Crusaders Of Chemistry

Crusaders of Chemistry

PRINTED AT THE Country Life Press, GARDEN CITY, N. Y., u. 3. A,

CL

1938

GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC.

COPYRIGHT, 1930

Y JONATHAN NORTON LEONARD

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

FOREWORD

THIS book does not pretend to be a complete and
inclusive history of chemistry. If it were, it
should have five volumes and be written in German.
Nor is it a condensation of such a book. It is a study
of six men whose lives are red-letter pages in the
history of the science.

No monk-like laboratory workers were these six.
They were not interested in chemistry alone. Re-
ligion, politics, and medicine were not outside their
field, for in those days a "natural philosopher" could
touch on every human interest without unduly scat-
tering his attention. But each man left a deep and
lasting impression on the science we now call
chemistry.

All the six men treated in this book lived in times
of intellectual crisis. The course of their lives was
not smooth. They had to fight valiantly against the
prejudice and ignorance of the past, and they knew
the exaltation which comes only to the pioneer, the
prophet of a new doctrine for they were prophets
of the scientific method, the doctrine which now
dominates the world which it has done so much to
create.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

1. The Battlefield 3

2. The Doctor Mirabilis 17

3. Alchemy 63

4. The Medical Luther 91

5. The First Bishop of Science 133

6. The Chemical Revolution 179

7. Joseph Priestley, the Minister Who

Wanted To Believe 201

8. Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Ma-

chine 241

9. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, the Grand

Seigneur of Science 263

10. The Harvest of Peaceful Middle Age 303

Illustrations

FACING PAGE

1. An Early Alchemical Hint 6

2. Roger Bacon 54

3. A Page from the Famous Voynich Manu-

script 54

4. A Typical Alchemical Recipe 86

5. Paracelsus 118

6. Priestley's Pneumatic Trough 166

7. Robert Boyle Testing Nature's "Abhor-

rence of a Vacuum" 166

8. A Humble Martyr to Science 166

9. Joseph Priestley 214

10. Henry Cavendish 246

11. Lavoisier and His Wife 278

The Battlefield

CHAPTER I
The Battlefield

And evermore, where that ever they goon
Man may hem knowe by smell of brimstoon;
For all the world they stinken as a goot;
Her savor is so rammish and so hoot,
That though a man from hem a myle be,
The savour wol infecte him, trusteth me.
Chaucer, THE CHANOUNS YEMANNES TALE.

THE chemical laboratory still smells much the
same as it did in Chaucer's day, and chemistry
is still called "stinks" in the English public schools,
but since then the science of chemistry has come very
much up in the world. The chemists are no longer
hunted from town to town by indignant priests
backed up by direct-action constables. Kings no
longer hire them in secret to adulterate the currency
with synthetic gold and burn them in public when
they fail. They no longer bury their textbooks in the
earth and consult them by the light of the moon.
Chemistry has a long and checkered history. It

4 Crusaders of Chemistry

has been practiced by all sorts of men from Egyptian
priests to modern college professors. During the
Middle Ages it was called "alchemy" and existed as
a curious hybrid, part science, part religion, part
magic. The alchemists used many of the processes
we use to-day, but were apt to throw in a few prayers
for good measure. As the Middle Ages passed into
the Renaissance, chemistry changed to fit the times,
gradually shook off its mysticism, and was ready by
the middle of the Seventeenth Century to lead the
world toward modern scientific civilization.

In our modern world chemistry occupies a key
position. Without it our civilization would fall to
the ground. Wheels would cease to turn, crops would
fail, and plagues would reduce the population to a
sickly remnant. Our automobiles would still be
wooden ox-carts if chemistry hadn't learned how to
make cheap and strong metals. And the bright colors
of modern life would be poor dull things if chemistry
had not made the black coal-tar blossom like the
rose.

But the battle wasn't an easy one. Not only were
the secrets of Nature hard to learn, but the chemists
had to fight for the right to discover these secrets
and proclaim them to the world. They had to fight
the superstitious who considered their work mere
trafficking with the devil. They had to fight the

The Battlefield 5

Church which tried manfully to destroy its growing
rival, Science, before it got too strong. They had to
fight sentimental military men who feared another
invention like the gunpowder which destroyed so un-
feelingly their beautiful armored knights. And they
had to fight against the universal feeling of the ma-
jority of mankind that things are best as they are
and should be let alone.

Chemistry, like all other sciences, began not as a
science but as a series of practical discoveries. The
first chemist was the hairy person who discovered
that the coals of a lightning-set forest fire could be
fed with dry branches, kept alive, and domesticated.
The other sciences started the same way. The first
physicist was the ape-man who found that he could
hit harder with a club than with his bare fist. The
first biologist was the primitive herdsman who dis-
covered that two goats, properly introduced, make
three.

These are empirical discoveries, not true science.
Men knew that certain things happened. They even
knew how to control their happening. But they
didn't know why they happened. And from the very
beginning they were curious. Weird and elaborate
were the theories they built up. Fire they considered
a god who lived on dry wood and sometimes, to
punish man for his various misdeeds, consumed

6 Crusaders of Chemistry

whole forests. Lightning was the spear of the Lord.
Good spirits inhabited their tools and their growing
grain. Little devils helped the frost to split rocks,
and greater devils breathed the plague into the
nostrils of mankind.

Gradually men learned the habits of these devils
and spirits. They learned, for instance, that the iron-
making spirit was pleased if a little chalk or lime-
stone were added to his diet of ore and charcoal.
They found that the fire spirit couldn't get along
without the spirit of the air. Learning the mysterious
ways of the spirits of material things was the first
step toward a practical technology.

Strangely enough this mystical phase of chemistry
has not entirely passed yet, as anyone can see for
himself if he takes the trouble to go to a large public
library and watch the curious people who read the
books on alchemy. No one studies mechanics with a
prayer book in one hand. Practically no one ever did.
The mathematician doesn't chant an ancient charm
as he integrates a differential equation. But chemistry
is different. There are still plenty of people who be-
lieve that certain chemical reactions are not re-
sponsible to the laws of the physical universe. There
were more in past ages, but some remain.

The reason for this extraordinary vitality of the
mystical aspect of chemistry is easy to find. With the

AN EARLY ALCHEMICAL HINT

"He who does not understand this picture does not
understand the preparation of the Art." from

"SPI FNDOR SOLIS."

The Battlefield 7

exception of biology, which only recently passed the
simple-mindedly empirical stage, chemistry was the
most complicated and baffling of the early sciences.
Its fundamental laws were hidden under many layers
of confusing mystery. When the early mathematician
discovered that the square of the hypotenuse equaled
the sum of the squares of the other two sides, he had
found a fact which was completely true. It was part
of the mechanism of the universe. He could de-
velop it and use it to find more facts. But when the
early chemist found that a certain green stone gave
copper if heated with charcoal, he knew no more
about the mechanism of matter than he did before.
Other green stones gave no copper. Some black
stones did. The best the chemists could do was to
build up a mass of practical information which en-
abled them to get copper as easily as possible and
hope that some time in the future they would kno\v
the why as well as the how.

This sort of practical information began to accu-
mulate very early. The Egyptians had a great store
of it, which they used with much skill. Their colored
glass was as good in many respects as the best we
can make now. They must have had very fine steel
or they would not have been able to perform their
marvelous carvings on the hardest materials. The
cement of the pyramids has defied the weather of

8 Crusaders of Chemistry

four thousand years, something which modern
cement is very unlikely to do.

But there they stopped. They never worked out
any valid theories to explain the reactions they used
so successfully. And neither did the Hindus, the
Greeks, or the Romans. ,The stock of empirical
knowledge was passed down through the ages. Some
of it was lost, and some new methods and processes
were discovered. But whenever the more contempla-
tive of the chemists tried to reason out the rules of
their science, they came sharply against a blank wall.
They couldn't establish a single fundamental law.
The subject was too complicated. They were up
against one of those terrible problems, ao part of
which can be solved without solving very nearly the
jvhole.

This is the way it worked. Take a comparatively
simple reaction, such as the hardening of lime plaster
when exposed to air. It hardened all right. Men had
observed this from the earliest times. But no one
knew why. We now know that the carbon dioxide in
the air combines with the calcium hydroxide of the
plaster to form calcium carbonate and water. But
the ancients didn't even know there was such a thing
as carbon dioxide. And they thought with good
reason that water was the simplest and most ele-
mentary of all substances. Or take the burning of

The Battlefield 9

wood. We know that the oxygen of the air combines
with the carbon and hydrogen of the wood to form
carbon dioxide and water. But the ancients didn't
3ream of oxygen. They had no reason to think that
air was not a simple substance, and to discover that
it was not, they ;would have had to develop balances
capable of weighing minute quantities ; they would
have had to make apparatus to control elusive gases,
and they'd have had to learn to shut their eyes to all
the side manifestations so conspicuous in combustion
the flame, the smoke, and the ash. There was no
chemical problem which could be isolated and
studied by itself. You had to grasp the whole subject
or nothing.

Confronted by this apparently insoluble mystery,
the ancient chemists did what might have been ex-
pected. They concocted sweeping theories about
matter and tried to prove that the facts agreed with
them. Some of these theories are quite reasonable.
Aristotle, whose theory was the best of the lot, de-
cided that the universe was made of four "elements,"
earth, air, fire, and water, and this theory, although
obviously imperfect, was the best man could do for
two thousand years. The work of the practical
chemists went on; they discovered many isolated
facts. But until the Eighteenth Century, the essential

io Crusaders of Chemistry

mystery was hardly better understood than it was in
the days of Alexander the Great.

If all men had been like Aristotle, the course of
science would have run smoothly. Men would have
worked patiently gathering facts, stored them away,
and waited until they had accumulated enough of
the pieces to put together into a perfect pattern. But
that's not the way of human nature. It's human to
read the last chapter of a novel. It's human to gen-
eralize beyond the facts. Also it is human to invoke
divine aid to guide your researches.

Early chemists were very seldom philosophers like
Aristotle. They were men of the people, trying dimly
to cope with a subject which they did not under-
stand. And just as the Egyptian priests invented gods
and demons to explain the reactions in their furnaces,
the chemists of the Middle Ages attributed to God
the powers which they could not prove were inherent
in the materials they worked with.

This sounds harmless, even quaint, but it's one of
the unfortunate things about human nature that as
soon as religious ideas take a hand in a problem, the
facts have to retire to a back seat. Apparently most
human beings need some sort of religion, something
to believe without proof. But the tragedy occurs
when an article of faith devised by theological minds
to explain an unsolved problem declines to be re-

The Battlefield 11

placed by a subsequent and rational solution of that
problem. But this happens wherever religion and
reason exist side by side. Religion is the status quo.
It is the scrap basket into which are thrown all prob-
lems which cannot be solved by other means. And
when a man comes along who can, with unaided
mind, dig deeply into the mass of natural fact and
unearth a reasoned conclusion, all the bureaucrats
of religion the priests, the theologians, the mag-
nates of the Established Church pounce on him like
a pack of wolves. And they do well to do so. For in
every active epoch of human history religion has
been like a sandy island eaten away by the sea. It
has no hope of gaining territory. It must defend what
it has. And the man of science with a new explana-
tion for one of the mysteries of Nature is an enemy
to be feared and combated, for if he explains, for
instance, that lightning is an electrical discharge,
not a weapon of the Lord, the Church as well as the
Lord has lost a stronghold.

There'll be a good deal about religion in the fol-
lowing chapters, for the chemists up to the end of
the Eighteenth Century had to fight with the Church
for every inch of the ground. The Church has long
since abandoned its positions against chemistry. The
battle is over, and religion is throwing its remaining
strength against the newer and more vulnerable

12 Crusaders of Chemistry

sciences of biology and psychology, but chemistry
for centuries bore the brunt of the battle. In its
alchemical phase it was treated by the Church as
just another heresy. After Paracelsus it had to fight
the battles of medicine, a profession of which the
Church has always tacitly hoped to take control.
And later when the scientific method became estab-
lished, chemistry, at that time merged with physics,
was the first science to make it bear definite fruit,
and the Church very rightly regarded the Scientific
Method as its most dangerous enemy.

So it was no accident that many of the early chem-
ists were as much concerned with religion as they
were with science. Roger Bacon was a friar who
hoped to establish a new system of thought based on
reason rather than on faith. The Church imprisoned
him. Paracelsus tried to take medicine from the
power of the Church and the Galenic physicians who
were tolerated by the Church because their informa-
tion came from the same source as Christian theology.
The Church drove him into vagabondage. Robert
Boyle was an intensely pious man, but his champion-
ship of the scientific method brought him under at-
tack, and he too would have fallen if he hadn't been
a nobleman powerful at court. Joseph Priestley was
a Dissenting minister whose scientific doctrines led
him to advocate Unitarianism, which, since it is half

The Battlefield 13

religion and half reason, the Church hates both as an
enemy and as a traitor. He was exiled. Cavendish
escaped only because he was a very rich man who de-
sired no contact with society. Not until we come to
Lavoisier do we find a scientist who didn't have to
battle with the Church. And he, poor man, came in
conflict with a different if just as ferocious force, the
French Reign of Terror.

The battle is over now, and Chemistry with certain
of the other sciences is something of an established
church itself. It has its endowments, its institutions.
When rich men die, they leave it large sums in the
same spirit in which they once endowed the mon-
asteries, churches, and chantries. After-dinner speak-
ers give it credit for increasing the happiness and
well-being of humanity, and they sound quite like
their medieval equivalents who thanked Christian-
ity for these benefits.

But the story will repeat itself. It always does.
Perhaps the Christian Church will never regain
enough strength to go on a crusade against science,
but another status quo will establish itself and de-
fend its doctrines against all comers. Perhaps science
itself will become a conservative dogma desperately
and ferociously opposed to a new kind of thought
growing out of modern philosophical physics or the
still-to-be-discovcred phenomena of the mind. Then

14 Crusaders of Chemistry

we'll have the story of Bacon, Boyle, and Priestley
all over again. Audacious and earnest innovators
will battle with equally earnest conservatives who
want the world to stand still. Then someone, late in
the cycle, will look back and find to his surprise
that men before him had to fight for the right to
reason, for the right to think for themselves.

The Doctor Mirabilis

CHAPTER II
The Doctor Mirabilis

IT WAS an April morning in the year 1268, and
the sun had just risen. Past the open end of the
courtyard ran the Seine, high with spring rain and
dark blue in the morning light. The towers of Notre
Dame cast jagged shadows across it, and a snub-
nosed riverboat floated down noiselessly, bound for
Havre and loaded with French wines for England.
From a door under the cloister came a tall, middle-
aged man dressed in a brown robe with a brown
rope around his middle. His head was bare and
shaved, and a rosary of wooden beads hung around
his neck. He stretched a little, rubbed his eyes, looked
at the river and the boat, looked up into the blue
sky where a small white cloud was chasing a still
smaller one, and turned squarely to the cast to let the
sunlight clear the shadows out of his mind. Then he
crossed a corner of the courtyard, opened another
door, and entered the strangest room in Christendom.
It was his laboratory the laboratory of Roger
Bacon.

17

1 8 Crusaders of Chemistry

The room was large, but from end to end it was
filled with the weirdest collection of curiosities ever
assembled by a Christian scholar. The walls were
covered with books, some bright and new, some black
with the fingering of ages, some of clumsy parch-
ment, some of soft, porous paper. Among them were
rolls of brown papyrus and great folio sheets pressed
between wooden boards. Other shelves were filled
with minerals glittering in the yellow sunlight or
dull with the dust of neglect. From the beams over-
head hung bunches of dried herbs, small leather
bags, barbaric weapons with inscriptions in strange
letters, and other things to which Bacon alone could
have put a name.

Littered about on tables were geometrical dia-
grams, compasses, rulers, and quill pens of various
sizes. A large charcoal furnace sat solidly in a corner,
and near it were racks of glass and clay vessels
alembics, crucibles, and curcurbits. Heavy oak cup-
boards flaunted large keyholes and gave the
impression of being very securely locked.

Bacon sat down before an upright desk and opened
a manuscript book in some graceful Oriental script.
A knock came at the door, and a young man entered.

"There's a brown friar at the outer gate, master,"
he said. "I told him it was too early in the morning,
but I couldn't get rid of him."

The Doctor Mirabilis 19

"Who is he?"

"Brother Manfred."

"Throw him out, the sneaking spy."

"But Master, you know what he's like. He'll tell
everyone in town you didn't dare see him."

"He'll be right too. I'm afraid of him. His hobby
is heresy. He could find it in the works of Lord
Jesus himself. But show him in. Wait though. I've
got some things here I don't want him to see."

Bacon went to a table and picked up an elaborate
contraption of brass and small lenses. He put it into
a cupboard and tucked some loose sheets of paper
in beside it. He locked the cupboard with a large
key.

"All right. Now we're ready for him."

Presently Brother Manfred arrived, smiling a
rather unconvincing smile. He was a small thin man
whose friar's robe flapped loosely about him. Bacon
bowed with poorly concealed hostility.

"It's a great pleasure," he said coldly, "to receive
a visit from so learned a man so early in the morning.
Most of the schoolmen are busy with their lectures
this time of day and haven't any time for poor tinker-
ers like me."

"You're not a tinkerer, Brother Roger," replied
the friar. "Your learning is the pride of our order.
They say you know more than any other man alive."

20 Crusaders of Chemistry

"I know some things, Brother," said Bacon, "but
only those things which diligent study can teach. And
you, my friend, are famous for diligence."

Brother Manfred went across the room and picked
up the book which Bacon had been reading.

"What's this?" he asked. "The letters are skill-
fully made, but I can't read them."

"That's a holy book, written by a Christian of
Damascus."

"Is it heresy?"

"Perhaps. But in those days heresy was not as in-
excusable as it is now. The Blessed Apostles walked
in the streets of Damascus, and the writer of this
book may have talked with Our Lord himself."

"True, true," said Brother Manfred. He went ta
a table and picked up a large white flower, some-
what "faded, which lay there.

"You seem to love flowers, Brother Roger. But
you've pulled one of the petals off this one."

"Our Lord Himself said 'Consider the lilies of
the field.' He knew without looking how the petals
were attached, but poor mortals like us have to find
out for ourselves."

Brother Manfred went to the other end of the
room where the furnace stood among its racks of
apparatus.

"An alchemist would be glad of this array."

The Doctor Mirabilis 21

"Pope Sylvester the Second was an alchemist who
learned his art among the infidels of Spain. Yet he
lived to hold the keys of heaven."

Brother Manfred turned away from the furnace
and faced Bacon squarely.

"They tell me," he said, "that you have an engine
made of crystal which lets you look into the soul
itself. I should like to see it."

"You are mistaken. There is no such engine here."

"I heard it on good authority. Perhaps you
wouldn't know the soul even if you saw it plainly."

"Perhaps not. I've taken only minor orders."

Manfred went slowly to the door.

"Now I must go," he said reluctantly, "but some
other time I should like to come and hear more of
your work. Your learning is the talk of Paris."

"You will be welcome. I shall be glad to show you
the few poor truths I have found in the works of
the Fathers."

As soon as the door closed behind Manfred, Bacon
winked happily at his young assistant.

"How were my answers, Peter? Did I look
nervous?"

"You did fine, Master. I haven't heard such piety
since I came here."

"When I was young, I argued in the schools and
learned all the little tricks they teach there. It's a

22 Crusaders of Chemistry

silly business, but it came in handy to-day. It's good
he couldn't read my book or look through the door
of my closet"

"He was as likely to look through the door as he
was to read the book. The friars know a lot about
the Scriptures and the Fathers, but that's all they
do know."

"Right, Peter. You know the friars as well as I do.
But now we'll have to get to work. You make two
copies of this letter. In half an hour John will be
here all ready to start."

Peter went to a table and began to write. Bacon
sat down at another on which lay two large books
bound in bright new leather, marked "Volume I"
and "Volume II." Bacon placed them one upon the
other, turned both backs toward him, and read the
names on the spines: "Opus Majus, Volume I, Vol-
ume II, by Roger Bacon." He did this slowly as if
his mind were far away. Then suddenly he aroused
himself and with a few quick motions wrapped the
books in a square of cloth and put them in a leather
case made to fit. He turned down the heavy cover
and strapped it tight. Then he leaned back in his
chair, put his hand over his eyes, and waited.

After a few minutes the door of the room opened
and a young man, hardly more than twenty, appeared

The Doctor Mirabilis 23

against the sunlight. He wore a traveling costume
and carried a partially filled knapsack on his back.

"Here I am, Master/' he said gayly, "all dressed
and ready to go."

Bacon looked up from his reverie. His whole ex-
pression had changed. Not the shadow of a smile
hid among his features and he looked years older. He
weighed the case of books in one hand ; then laid it
down on the table.

"John," he said slowly, "you were my first pupil,
and the only one I've educated according to my own
ideas. You can think in straight lines, not in neat
circles like the best of the schoolmen, or in aimless

snarls like the worst of them. And now " Bacon

picked up the case of books and slammed it down
on the table with a crash. "Now, do you realize what
you're taking to Rome?"

"I ought to," said John lightly. "We've worked
on it long enough together, you bringing great
thoughts out of your head and I trying to understand
what they're all about."

"You understand well enough," said Bacon,
"better than the schoolmen who strut around Paris
so pompously. But that's not what I mean. Come

nearer."

John sat down on the bench near the master.
"That leather case," said Bacon slowly, "is the

24 Crusaders of Chemistry

most precious load in Christendom. I'm not speaking
lightly when I say this. I mean it. If the knowledge
it contains and the theory of thought it teaches should
become accepted throughout Europe, they will
change the aspect of the whole world. We Latins are
now a poor fringe on the outskirts of civilization.
The Saracens know more than we do; the Turks
throw back our armies; and out beyond the Black
Sea rage the Tartars, millions and millions of them,
savage, without heart, mind, or conscience, whom an
ill wind might any day blow down upon Europe.
Never did our race hold more precariously to life.

"Our leaders do little to guard against these
dangers. Our soldiers fight well, deal their blows
bravely, and die with the name of Christ on their
lips. But they accomplish nothing. The Turks and
Tartars are brave too. They've got as good swords
and better horses. They'll never be conquered by
stupid force. There are too many of them.

"We Latins have one weapon which can save both
us and Christianity. It's rusty with neglect. The
schoolmen have put it away in the corners of their
minds and take it out only from curiosity. This
weapon is Science. If we polish it and sharpen it
again, we shall be irresistible. We shall extend
Christianity to Farther India, to Cathay, right round
the world. No Tartar, no Turk or Saracen will stand

The Doctor Mirabilis 25

against us. The Pope won't shiver in his slippers
every time a messenger comes from the East."

"I know this," said John, "and I know how im-
portant it is. I won't drink a drop of wine or speak to
a single girl until I've put the books into the Pope's
hands."

"Oh, you can resist temptation all right, but that
won't be enough. Your job isn't that of a mere mes-
senger. You're an ambassador from a country which
as yet has only a handful of citizens. And such an
ambassador has to work carefully.

"The Pope is a wise and broad-minded man, but
after all a Pope is a Pope, and they all have to have
certain prejudices. That's their job. They guard the
established order. They defend the faith against all
comers. They rule temporal Christendom as much as
they dare, and watch closely for any tendency which
may lessen their authority. The ideas in my book will
do just that. They will raise up a power much
stronger than faith, and perhaps the Pope and all he
stands for will go down before them. So you see
you'll have to be very careful.

"This book of mine is planned so as not to arouse
the Pope's suspicions. I've told only the truths which
won't alarm him. I've avoided heresy as much as I
could. I've promised great benefits for Christendom
and I've proved as well as I could that the study of

26 Crusaders of Chemistry

science will lead to a more perfect understanding of
God through knowledge of His works.

"But I don't hope to deceive His Holiness com-
pletely. That's not possible, and it's not necessary.
If he can be persuaded that he can reap the ad-
vantages of my program without doing too much
violence to the fabric of the Christian faith, he'll
come around to my point of view. Don't lay all your
cards on the table. Remember that as you go up the
scale of power, the methods of diplomacy become
more and more insincere. The Pope is at the very
top. He can't be frank and open, or he wouldn't be
Pope. So don't tell him all you know. He won't be
able to see by himself the ultimate results of our
program, and you mustn't give him any hints.
[Demonstrate the immediate advantages of our system,
and don't discuss such things as the faith or the
Scriptures. That's his specialty, and he can do it
better than you can. Be simple-spoken, or appear to
be. Offer him a weapon against the enemies of the
Church and make him realize the power of it. Don't
let him suspect that far in the future the weapon may
kill the Church that wields it. Do you understand?"

"Yes, I do, Master. WeVe talked about this be-
fore, and you've taught me what to say."

"I know I have, but I wanted to go over it again
so it would be fresh in your mind. I think you know

The Doctor Mirabilis 27

how to act. Now for the tricky business of getting
the books before His Holiness."

"The road's pretty safe now, and I'll have the
sanctity of a pilgrim."

"That's not the point. These books must reach the
Pope himself and not be fended away by any of the
cardinals, monks, and friars who surround him like
hornets around a drop of honey. The trouble will be-
gin the minute you get to Rome. You'll travel as a
simple pilgrim. Remain one when you get there.
Don't stay at the house of my order. Don't tell any-
one what you carry. Don't talk at all. Go direct to
the palace and present your letter. I'll give you two
copies in case one is intercepted by my enemies. The
Pope will grant you an interview."

"And I'll give the books into his own hand."

"By all means. But even then your job will be only
half done. Not only must the book reach the Pope,
but it must be guided safely into the inner depths of
his mind. His courtiers will offer to read the books
for him to save him time and trouble. But he must
read them himself. And you must see that he does.
Tell him what the books are and what they contain.
Remind him that he asked to see them. ( Then ask
for a chance to explain the obscure passages."

"I'll do all this, Master,, I know what it means to
you. I'll think about it all the way to Rome."

28 Crusaders of Chemistry

From the street outside came shouts and the sound
of horses' hoofs.

"I must go, Master," said John. "Here are my
Norman pilgrims. They want to get started early."

Bacon followed him into the courtyard and
watched him into the street. The pilgrims' noises died
away in the distance, but Bacon still watched, his
hopes reaching out toward Rome.

It was a small matter, this God-speeding of a
manuscript. There were no academic fanfares. None
knew of its departure; few even of its preparation.
If the great philosophers of the day, Albertus Mag-
nus or Thomas Aquinas, had looked into it, they
would have turned up their noses patronizingly, or
perhaps taken the trouble to denounce in a few
thundering words the damnable heresy it contained.
The teachings of Bacon had little vogue in the
schools of Paris. They were too earthy, too eyes-to-
the-ground; they led too little toward "a perfect
understanding of God" to please the theological
acrobats who contorted themselves skillfully in a self-
made lather of words. The schoolmen of Paris smiled
at Roger Bacon with his mirrors, his furnaces, and
his habit of talking eagerly with anyone, knight or
peddler, who'd visited strange lands. "What's this

The Doctor Mirabilis 29

got to do with salvation?" asked the schoolmen.
"What has the rainbow to do with philosophy ex-
cept to show the glory of God?" They waived him
aside as a mere meddler in matters too small to
notice. And the little boys of the streets would steal
into the courtyard and look through the windows of
the laboratory where Bacon was busy with crucibles,
diagrams, or curved lenses of rock crystal. They'd
wonder at the sparks and the glowing metal, then
run away laughing when Friar Bacon stood up and
glared at them across a bright bed of charcoal*

What sort of man was this "Friar Bacon" whose
labors were so slightly esteemed at Paris? His own
age knew little about him, and this little was for-
gotten soon after his death. A curious legend grew
up in its place. "Friar Bacon" became a magician
who made brazen heads speak, cities open their gates
to besiegers, and cavalry fly through the air. He
signed contracts with the devil, who appeared as a
beautiful woman shining white among the coals of
his furnace. He could walk into stone walls and dis-
appear. The secrets of the king's council room and
bedchamber were known to him by magic. He could
make gold from mercury, lead, or the tarnished brass
of a cooking vessel. Like many a scientist to follow,
he became a warlock because the public of his day,

30 Crusaders of Chemistry

unable to understand him, preferred to think he
could not be understood at all.

Roger Bacon was born of good family at Ilchester,
Somerset, about the year 1214. Almost nothing at
all is known about his childhood. When still a young
boy according to modern reckoning, he went to Ox-
ford and came under the influence of Robert Gros-
seteste, who taught in the school of the Franciscans
from 1230 to 1235.

This Robert Grosseteste was a remarkable man
who might be called the leading liberal thinker of
his time. His influence made the intellectual atmos-
phere at Oxford decidedly less murky than at Paris,
where such scholars as Alexander of Hales were al-
ready building up the imposing but unsound
structure of Scholasticism. Grosseteste was something
of a mathematician, something of a scientist. He was
interested in various sorts of learning which were
much disapproved by his fellow churchmen. He even
went so far as to bring several Greek scholars from
schismatic Constantinople to visit him at Oxford
where they left behind them a tenuous tradition of
Greek learning. After he became Bishop of Lincoln,
the administrative affairs of his important diocese
occupied more of his mind, but while at Oxford he
was a landmark of common sense and enlightened
learning in the hopeless obscurity of medieval

The Doctor Mirabilis 31

thought His influence started Bacon on the difficult
road which led to what he called "the True Knowl-
edge."

There is no use trying to give an accurate account
of the details of Bacon's life or his movements be-
tween Paris and Oxford. Every date has to be fol-
lowed by a question mark. He probably traveled
frequently between the two. Scholars in that day
were citizens of no country. They spoke Latin, lived
in the houses of the Church, and traveled about to
hear famous teachers or to give lectures of their own.
Let it suffice that Bacon earned an Oxford degree of
M. A. and won much renown in the schools of both
countries as a lecturer on Aristotle. He also became
a Franciscan friar, probably to enjoy the protection
of this order and use its excellent facilities for study.
In the Thirteenth Century the Dominicans and the
Franciscans between them had gained such a domi-
nant position in the universities that not to belong
to one or the other was a severe handicap to any
scholar. The myth-makers who spun stories about
Bacon took the fact that he was a "brown friar" and
pictured him as wandering about the country, beg-
ging at manors and inns, and generally practising
the various chicaneries for which the friars were
famous. This was far from true. Bacon lived almost

32- Crusaders of Chemistry

his entire life at Paris and Oxford, and devoted him-
self exclusively to study and research.

The Thirteenth was one of the great centuries of
history. It marked the high point of medieval
civilization, and in many ways has not been surpassed
by any succeeding period. The cathedrals still defy
imitation. The songs of the troubadour and min-
nesinger still enchant those few who can read them.
And no man since Thomas Aquinas has constructed
a system of thought perfect enough to be accepted
by two hundred million people after six hundred
years. Thirteenth Century scholars were as subtle
as any to-day. Society was fairly well organized and
largely contented. But the Thirteenth Century lacked
one thing: a program for the future.

If a broad-minded modern scholar were to turn the
clock back some seven hundred years and find him-
self in Paris at the middle of the Thirteenth Century,
his first sensation would be delight at the intensity
of intellectual activity. The scholars were the men of
the hour. The Church governed most of the activity
of the city, and its leaders were men whose thoughts
were among the stars. The most promising road to
fame led through the university, and this road was
open to all. From the ends of Europe they gathered.
If a monastery, cathedral school, or the court of a
distant noble produced a young man with promising

The Doctor Mirabilis 33

intellect, he'd be provided with funds, books, and
letters of introduction and shipped off to Paris for
the greater glory of learning and the reputation of
his province. The political conflicts of the feudal
world were heard at Paris as only a distant rumble.
The scholars walked two by two along the banks
of the Seine, thinking high thoughts and living in
a paradise of intellectual detachment.

But our transplanted modern would soon feel a
second and not so reassuring sensation. Where was
this feverish activity leading? What did these bril-
liant churchmen and friars really hope to accom-
plish? Was their program continuous? Were they
working at a problem with unlimited possibilities
which would yield valuable results from time to
time? Unfortunately they were not. Medieval
scholarship was like a cavalcade, brilliant, colorful,
and gay, but headed for a blank wall. Like a mathe-
matical quantity which approaches a certain value
but never reaches it or goes beyond. Like
3.1416 which gets nearer and nearer to the ratio of
the circumference to the diameter, but never reaches
it and never even hopes to become 4. Scholasticism
was a backward-looking system dependent on the
authority of the past, and as such was self-limited in
range. The Scriptures and the writings of the
Church Fathers contained ortiy a certain number of

34 Crusaders of Chemistry

statements. These could, with great labor, be ar-
ranged and reconciled. The tremendous mind of
Thomas Aquinas did this. There was no more to do,
and Scholasticism smothered in a quicksand of mean-
ingless words. It took the twin explosions of the
Renaissance and the Reformation to break the steel
network which Scholasticism had woven about the
mind.

"What fools they were," says the thoughtless mod-
ern whose mind has been trained from childhood to
think along more or less scientific lines. "What blind
and silly fools. Why didn't they get out in the sun-
light and investigate some of the things in the world
around them? Why didn't they take the horn of a
sea-unicorn and see if it really burst into perspiration
when touched with poison? Why didn't they get a
diamond and see if it really split to bits when dipped
in goat's blood?" Well, the diamond merchants prob-
ably had, and Roger Bacon did, but such experiments
were contrary to the spirit of the time, unworthy of
serious and pious men. "The life on earth is nothing.
Salvation alone matters at all. The Scriptures con-
tain the information on this matter. The Church
Fathers have added illuminating explanations. What
can be more valuable than the study of these two
sources? Physics, medicine, astronomy, what are these
little things compared to the Perfect Understanding

The Doctor Mirabilis 35

of God? They are only of this life. What are three-
score years and ten compared to eternity?" So said
the schoolmen. So said the Church. So said the kings
and the nobles. Only Roger Bacon and the obscure
artisans in their workshops thought otherwise.

Such habits of thought, silly as they may seem, are
not mere foolishness. They involve problems of
fundamental human values which science, even mod-
ern science, hasn't even attempted to solve. If Salva-
tion" is possible and as desirable as the medieval
schoolmen thought, and if it may be attained by
knowledge of the Scriptures, then certainly the silly
laws of the physical universe are exceedingly unim-
portant by comparison. So said the schoolmen, and
they were right as far as they went. A change in their
intellectual aims would involve a change of faith,
and faith they considered their most precious posses-
sion. One man, however, saw the blank wall looming
up ahead of the procession. This man was Roger
Bacon.

A serious man was Bacon, a master of the dialectic
sleight-of-hand so much admired at the time, a
reader of strange languages and curious about distant
countries beyond the borders of Christendom. In
these ways he was not unique. In one respect only he
differed from the men of his time. He had little re-
gard for authority. When he read in some ancient

36 Crusaders of Chemistry

author that a vessel of hot water freezes faster than
one of cold, he didn't accept this as ultimate truth.
He took two vessels exactly alike, filled them with
hot and cold water, and set them outside in the
street. When the cold water froze first, he didn't
conclude that his eyes deceived him or that the devil
was laughing down the chimney. He said the ancient
author was mistaken or a liar. When a diamond-
cutter told him that he broke diamonds in a mortar
like anything else, he didn't call him a scoundrel,
but concluded that Pliny knew as little about dia-
monds as he did about the tides.

In the Thirteenth Century a man in a scientific
state of mind found plenty of work ready at hand.
The frontiers of knowledge had not been pushed
so far away that it took a lifetime to get beyond
the well-mapped territory. A cup of water, a mir-
ror, and a ray of sunlight contained easy truths
which no one in the world had observed before. The
goldsmith round the corner, the cook in the kitchen,
the peasant bringing his vegetables to market knew
isolated facts which an able mind might put together
into a regular pattern of science. Roger Bacon pro-
ceeded to do this. It wasn't easy. A thousand years
of Christian philosophy, a thousand years of classical
learning had to be thrown overboard or tested rigor-
ously for error. Long-standing habits of thought

The Doctor Mirabilis 37

must go. The doctrines of a beloved religion must
be put aside as the Scriptures and works of the saints
were passed under the pitiless lens of skeptical
scrutiny. But the results were amazing.

Gradually the conviction developed in Bacon that
he was born with a tremendous mission. He wasn't
an imaginative person; he didn't call himself a
prophet. But the more he learned about the physical
world around him the more he became convinced
that the scholarship of the Latins was on the wrong
track. That its efforts led nowhere. That the future
of Christianity, even its preservation from the appal-
ling dangers looming up out of Asia, depended on a
new start, a new learning built on something more
substantial than the barren theology which now ab-
sorbed its energies.

With this thought in the back of his mind he
forced himself to work as few men had worked be-
fore. Eighteen hours of study a day, two of recrea-
tion, and four of sleep. His health broke down and
he had to retire from the university. Soon he was
back at his desk. His eyes gave out. He invented
spectacles to correct his failing vision. He planned
his diet carefully perhaps the first in Europe to
do so. A mass of knowledge accumulated in his head
such as no man had ever possessed before.

But study alone was not enough. Wherever he

38 Crusaders of Chemistry

turned, he soon exhausted the known facts. He'd have
to find more. So, borrowing ideas for apparatus from
furtive alchemists, from artisans, from cutters of
precious stones, he went to work to test the facts he'd
winnowed from the writings of past ages. His con-
siderable fortune melted away, blown up the chimney
with the sparks of his furnace, paid out for lenses
and curved mirrors, for curiosities from foreign
lands, and for such trade secrets as were not given
free. But the great idea was taking shape.

In 1266, when Bacon was fifty-two years old, his
great opportunity came. Guy de Foulque, a French
scholar, became Pope as Clement IV. He was a
broad-minded man for the period and had heard
from common friends about Bacon's remarkable
work. Perhaps the controversies which Bacon's
"heresy" had stirred up at Paris were appealed to
Rome. At any rate he wrote Bacon to send his works
"in all haste and in secret, notwithstanding the pro-
hibition of any prelate or constitution of his order."

Bacon was tremendously excited and somewhat
terrified. He wrote back to Rome pleading for time.
The matter was too large for quick action. Nothing
was written down in proper form. His Holiness
would please give him a year to put his results to-
gether in a book worthy to pass before his supreme
judgment. The respite was granted, and Bacon gath-

The Doctor Mirabilis 39

ered all his remaining resources and buckled down
to the tremendous task of writing an intellectual
program for the world.

The great work, the Opus Ma]us, which Bacon
and his devoted pupils put together in the eighteen
months after receiving Clement's letter, is almost an
encyclopedia of medieval knowledge, at least that
part of it which had penetrated up from the em-
pirical discoveries of artizans and unlearned travel-
ers. Some things Bacon left out from prudence
but still the book contains enough to surprise any
modern who thinks that a man of the Thirteenth
Century couldn't have had the true scientific spirit.

Bacon didn't consider the Opus Majus a straight
scientific treatise. He called it a persuasio, that is, a
book written with a purpose, to convince the Pope
that the Latin world needed a new intellectual pro-
gram. Persuasion is not written solely for the reason-
ing mind; it also considers the sentiments and
prejudices of the person addressed. Popes have
strong prejudices, or they pretend to have, which
amounts to much the same thing. So Bacon, in plan-
ning his work, had to restrain his scientific en-
thusiasm, had to put over as strongly as possible his
ideas about the necessity of experimental science and
at the same time reassure the Pope that innovations in
this direction would help Christianity, not cause its

40 Crusaders of Chemistry

ultimate decline. Bacon's scientific method was the
fundamental heresy, the heresy with which the
Church still fights a losing battle ; his problem was to
cloak it in such conciliating words that the Pope
would hardly realize it was there.

A difficult task certainly, and the trouble began
with the first section, in which Bacon demolishes the
intellectual method of the time and shows the causes
for its stagnation and practical failure. Many are his
circumlocutions, long are his conciliating ap-
proaches, but finally he has to get down to what he
isolates as the root-cause of error belief in the
authority of the past. Here's where he had to step
carefully. The Church draws a distinction between
faith and belief in traditional authority, but it's one
of those distinctions which don't convince anyone
who hasn't a strong will to believe. Bacon pretended
to understand the difference perfectly, and he opens
his chapter with a long statement to that effect. Then
he launches a savage attack on the blind belief in
the past which was the evil genius of medieval
thought.

"Four causes of error there are, among the Latins,"
says Bacon. "These are dependence on authority,
yielding to established custom, allowing weight to
the general opinion, and concealment of real igno-
rance with pretense of knowledge." The first three

The Doctor Mirabilis 41

are related and boil down to a slavish devotion to
the past. The fourth, as Bacon says, is common to all
ages and has to be guarded against wherever it ap-
pears. Bacon's language is careful and judicious, but
through the moderate statements you can feel the fire
of his wrath against the conservatism of the schoolmen.
He complains bitterly that the method of argument
in his day was something like this: "It is affirmed by
predecessors, it is the customary view, it is the pop-
ular opinion; therefore it must be correct" If any-
one disagreed, he was overwhelmed with quotations
from the Scriptures, and his only defense was to
quote back. Even then the simplest observed truth
wasn't sure of winning. Bacon almost says that
you can prove anything from the Scriptures if you
are clever enough. But he stops just in time. After all
he was writing a persuasio for the Pope. And the
Pope himself wouldn't dare to let such blasphemy go
unpunished.

Having dealt with the schoolmen, Bacon proceeds
to run over the stock of scientific knowledge of the
time, working into it certain of his own discoveries
and showing where possible the value to Christianity
of increased knowledge in the field. This part of the
Opus Majus looks rather feeble to our eyes. The
sciences of Bacon's day were few in number and
limited in extent. Except by the Arabs, almost noth-

44 Crusaders of Chemistry

Mongols had destroyed the Caliphate, leveled Bag-
dad to the ground, and defeated the Saracens and
Turks, against whom all Europe had struggled two
centuries in vain. It was a gloomy and uneasy time
for Christendom. At any moment a new onslaught
might burst from the steppes of Russia. There would
be no warning. The Tartars rode well ahead of the
news of their coming. Bacon looked across the Seine
from his peaceful courtyard and imagined the sack
of Paris. Streets littered with bodies; men and
women, monks and nuns cut to bits or flayed alive;
houses in ashes, and the Tartars encamped in the
public squares, their eyes in popular belief dripping
small streams of ice-cold blood. Then he'd turn back
to his work with new determination. He was the
only man in the world with a weapon to make Europe
safe from the attack of Asia.

To be sure, the specific weapons with which Bacon
hoped to equip the armies of the West were not very
formidable. He speaks of a curved mirror which by
converging the rays of the sun might set fire to be-
sieged cities. He attributes great power to the Tar-
tars' supposed knowledge of astrology. And although
he was apparently familiar with gunpowder, he
doesn't think of using it except in firecrackers to
frighten the enemy. But Bacon was no soldier and
doesn't pretend to know much about military

The Doctor Mirabilis 45

practice. His plea is for an organized campaign to
learn the secrets of Nature. When this is done, mili-
tary devices will appear of themselves:

"We must consider that although other
sciences, such as geometry, do many wonders, yet
the wonderful things of most service to the state
belong to Experimental Science, which teaches
us how to make and use marvellous instruments.
The enemies of the Church of God should be
destroyed rather by the discoveries of science
than by the warlike arms of combatants."

It's astonishing to observe how right he was. All
during the Middle Ages, Europe, the small, remote,
disunited peninsula, barely maintained itself against
the East. Its outside conquests were short-lived, and
the Turks, Tartars, and Saracens, when not fighting
among themselves, won nearly every conflict. Only
after the Renaissance, when Europe had waked up
and invented firearms, superior sailing ships, and the
better methods of agriculture and industry to keep
its armies supplied did it feel safe from Asia, did its
conquest of the world begin.

From a scientific standpoint, Bacon's treatment of
optics, scattered more or less through the book, is the
most impressive thing in it. It's the part which makes
us most certain that he didn't put down all he knew.
Optics looks like a safe enough subject, and in itself

46 Crusaders of Chemistry

it is. But its two great discoveries, the telescope and
the microscope, have done more to change our view
of the world around us than all other discoveries
put together. The telescope has told us that the earth
is not the center of the universe a very revolution-
ary conclusion from a theological point of view
and the microscope has shown us the world of the
bacteria and proved that even the sacred human body
is composed of cells very much like them in struc-
ture. A man afraid of the dead hand of the Church
would be wise to keep his knowledge of these two
devices secret.

It is not certain that Bacon actually constructed
a microscope or a telescope, but all through his works
are hints, perhaps unconscious, that he had:

"The wonders of refracted vision are even
greater. Very large objects can be made to ap-
pear very small and the reverse, and very distant
objects will seem close at hand and conversely.
For we can so shape transparent bodies and ar-
range them in such a way in respect to our sight
and objects of vision that the rays will be bent in
any direction we desire, and under any angle
we desire we shall see the object near at hand or
at a distance. A child might appear a mountain.
We might make the sun, moon, and stars in ap-
pearance to descend here below."

The Doctor Mirabilis 47

This chapter is merely a prediction. Bacon says
that a device for seeing at a great distance might be
constructed, and in the previous sections he explains
in very scientific language just why this is so. There
is no direct statement that he actually had constructed
such an instrument. But he had the lenses. They were
nothing new. He understood how they worked and
why, and a simple astronomical telescope can be
made by any child out of two convex lenses arranged
at the proper distance from each other. This dis-
tance doesn't even have to be accurate. In another
passage Bacon remarks that an instrument for bring-
ing distant bodies nearer also "makes the highest
parts lowest and vice versa," which is exactly what
an astronomical telescope does. The image is re-
versed. Here is where Bacon gives himself away. It
is very unlikely that he would have known this
startling fact if he had not actually constructed a
telescope and used it.

The situation with the microscope is similar. The
simple magnifying glass was perfectly familiar in
Bacon's day. Had been for ages. There is evidence
that the Egyptians used it. But no one knew very
clearly how it worked. Bacon did. He shows this
plainly in many passages. The next step, an obvious
one, was to take two convex lenses, any two would
do, arrange them properly, by theory or mere ex-

48 Crusaders of Chemistry

perimentation, and look into a world the very exist-
ence of which men had not suspected before.

Did Bacon do this? There is evidence that he did.
The most striking is contained in the Thirteenth
Century Voynich Manuscript, recently discovered.
The evidence that this extraordinary work was writ-
ten by Bacon is not entirely conclusive, but its age has
been definitely established by a technical examina-
tion of the paper, ink, etc. Its history has been traced
back into the Sixteenth Century without evidence of
any attempt at forgery. And if it were not by Bacon,
it must have been by some contemporary of his whose
mind was even more remarkable, and whose name,
by a miracle, has perished utterly. This Voynich
Manuscript is written in a cipher so complicated that
no one was able to throw the least light upon it un-
til Professor Newbold of the University of Pennsyl-
vania discovered that under a low-powered micro-
scope the small letters of certain meaningless words
resolved into close-packed groups of curved lines
very like shorthand. Critics have claimed that they
were made by wrinkles in the paper, but it must
have been very unusual paper, for no such markings
have been seen on any other manuscript. Professor
Newbold spent many years trying to decipher the
strange marks, and made some progress, but died be-
fore he'd translated enough to make his solution very

The Doctor Mirabilis 49

convincing. However, the very existence of the
marks, totally invisible to the unaided eye, proves
that Bacon had at his disposal a microscope of no
small power.

But the letters of the code are not the only proof.
The book is illustrated with curious drawings, gro-
tesque human figures, mystic signs, and strange
shapes made up of little circles like irregular bunches
of grapes. The cipher captions on the drawings are
still an unsolved puzzle, but the drawings them-
selves are no puzzle at all. Bacon was prying into
one of the deepest human mysteries, the mystery of
fertilization and reproduction. He did well to con-
ceal his work in an impenetrable cipher, for if the
Church had learned what he was up to, his blas-
phemy would have been punished by torture or the
stake.

It doesn't take a scholar or a biologist to see the
meaning of the drawings. Every layman can look
for himself. The little female figures are very
graphic symbolization of the process of fertiliza-
tion and pregnancy; the sinuous tadpole-like things
are human spermatozoa, for the first time pictured
by man, and the bunches of small grapes are various
kinds of body tissue, complete with cellular struc-
ture and all. Bacon had looked behind one of the

50 Crusaders of Chemistry

most sacred veils of Nature. It was lucky f o him that
he didn't send his results to the Pope.

So much for the scientific content of Bacon's great
work. There's a great deal more, most of it of high
quality and well worth looking into. But the most
important part is the chapter which Bacon calls "Ex-
perimental Science." Three hundred years later,
Francis Bacon, probably no relation to Roger and
certainly not a descendant, wrote his Novum Or-
ganum propounding the principles of scientific
thought. It would be interesting to know how much
he got from his long-dead and almost forgotten
namesake. He probably had access to John Dee's col-
lection of Roger Bacon Manuscripts. But the prob-
lem is one which will never be solved.

The scientific method is an old story to us now.
Most of us think that way, and those who do not,
think hardly at all. The process seems so natural to
us that we can't believe it was ever unknown. But
during the Middle Ages, and indeed during most of
the history of mankind, the prevailing habit of
thought was very different Men looked to the past
for enlightenment. They had the "good old days
complex" to an astonishing degree. "Revealed truth,"
"lost art," and "the great minds of the past" were
magic phrases of medieval learning. The road to
knowledge was through old books, the older the bet-

The Doctor Mirabilis 51

ten Only rarely did men dare think that they might,
by simple observation, learn more than their prede-
cessors had ever dreamed of.

Carefully, judiciously, stolidly, Bacon smashes
this theory of thought. He demonstrates various
errors in the greatest authorities. He ridicules the
popular superstitions which had worked their way
into the uncritical minds of the learned, and he sav-
agely denounces the theologians of the day whose
imposing systems were built on nothing but empty
words and thin air. "Get out and observe," he urges
again and again. "Get an 'Irish crystal' and look at
the play of iridescence on its surface. See how it re-
sembles the rainbow. There's a secret in those colors,
perhaps a secret which will do great things for man-
kind. Take a slate, a pencil, and a compass and see
for yourself the truth of Euclid's propositions which
young men learn to say parrot-like in the schools. Go
to foreign lands and look for the strange creatures
which are supposed to inhabit them. Experiment
with mirrors, growing plants, water, and the corro-
sive reagents of the alchemist. Above all, don't be-
lieve anything on authority while there's the
remotest chance of testing it for yourself."

This is a heavy blow at the pillars that supported
the Church and the whole medieval structure. Bacon
softens it as much as he can, giving long passages to

52 Crusaders of Chemistry

the usefulness of the new system of reasoning to
theology. He defines science as "a perfect understand-
ing of God through knowledge of His works." He
states that his pupil John, whom he'd educated to
think in the new way, was nevertheless remarkably
free from sin.

But even so, Bacon doesn't feel he's given enough
to Caesar. He has an uneasy 'feeling that the Pope
will look a few hundred years into the future, after
the manner of popes, and see the Church tottering to
its fall, the structure of theology discredited, and the
world plunged in a vast and dangerous confusion. So
he ends his book with a long and dreary chapter on
moral philosophy, carefully planned to soothe the
feelings of a suspicious churchman and make him see
that the devil was not the motive force behind him
and his theories.

In the last chapter Bacon sounds like any of the
other schoolmen. He is long-winded, fatuous, and
vague. He discusses theological problems which
have no meaning to the modern mind. But let's for-
give him this relapse. He was writing a persuasio
for a pope, a medieval pope, the doctrinal autocrat
of Europe. His freedom, his life even, hung in the
balance, and perhaps he was laughing up his sleeve.

The Doctor Mirabilis 53

It was the year 1277, ten years after the Opus
Majus had left so hopefully for Rome. Bacon sat
alone by his furnace, the coals of which still glowed
dimly and sent out a small stream of heat. He
watched the fire draw down deeper into the powdery
ash. No sparks flew up ; no crucible shone white ; no
mysterious liquid bubbled in its retort, giving off
with its steam the intoxicating hope of a great dis-
covery. Bacon's diagrams were packed away; his
lenses and mirrors were gone from the shelves. His
books were gone too, and a great gloomy silence filled
the room where once the voices of truth spoke clearly
from the blackness beyond human knowledge. It was
the end the end of his hopes for Christendom and
the world. The Church and Scholasticism had won ;
Bacon and u the True Knowledge" had lost.

Singly and silently other men came into the room
and sat down on benches near the master. When all
the benches were filled, they stood. Some were monks
in black robes; some were friars in brown or gray.
Some young men wore the clothes of ordinary lay-
men, while one old man in the gay cloak of a noble
had drawn a corner of it over his face and was weep-
ing silently. No one spoke; the empty shelves, the
bare tables, the dying fire spoke for them.

When no more came, when silence had penetrated
all corners of the room, Bacon looked up. He was an

54 Crusaders of Chemistry

old man now, with white beard, white hair, and a
bent appearance about the shoulders. He'd drawn
his brown friar's robe tight around him as if he were
cold. Finally he spoke.

"YouVe all seen the decree," he said.

Several of the listeners nodded. One young man
said "Yes" softly and there was silence again.

Bacon stood up and looked carefully from face to
face. He counted. Thirty-two men were in the room.
Each one he knew. Each one was an old friend and
trustworthy. Bacon motioned for the door to be
closed, for curtains to be drawn across the windows.
Then he went to a corner, pried with a knife at a
crack in the wall, and took down one of the oak
panels. The space behind was filled with books.
Bacon took them out and piled them on a table.
There were twelve in all. He turned to his friends,
who still sat silent in the semi-darkness.

"You have watched the rebirth of the true learn-
ing," he said, "and now you see its burial. My efforts
and yours were like a small flame held under a pile
of wet faggots too weak to light the whole, and dy-
ing out to leave only a few embers. Perhaps the em-
bers will flame up again. I hope so. I am doing all
I can to assure it. These books are the embers, and
the secrets they'll teach to all who know how to read

ROGER BACON

This drawing from a fifteenth century manuscript in
the Bodleian Library shows the great scientist medi-
tating on his many troubles

A PAGE from
the famous
Voynich man-

The Doctor Mirabilis 55

them are the flames which will some day set fire to all
Christendom.

"I do not know yet what my own fate will be. The
general of my order has condemned me for heresy,
for 'novitates suspectas/ He has sentenced me to pri-
son. The men-at-arms will be here in an hour or two.
I may be shut up in a dungeon. I may be put in some
remote monastery, kept from books, and prevented
from writing. I do not know. Since the death of
Clement IV my enemies have been all-powerful at
Rome. An appeal would be hopeless. But before they
take me away, I mean to make sure that my works
shall not entirely disappear.

"My friends, please excuse my suspicion. I have
suffered so much that I've learned to take precau-
tions. There are thirty-two of you here. I have twelve
books left, all my enemies couldn't find. I'm going to
distribute them among you in such a way that you
will not know who has received one and who has not.
I trust you all, each one separately, but some of you
may have a change of heart when you grow older,
and there are tortures which can open the most un-
willing lips."

Bacon went to the windows and adjusted the cur-
tains so that almost no light came through. In the
room could be seen only vague shapes.

56 Crusaders of Chemistry

"Now, my friends, come forward one by one. Do
not speak. Keep your faces down. If I hold out a
book, take it and hide it under your clothes. If I do
not, walk on without stopping. I shall not see who
you are. I shall not try to judge who is worthy of my
confidence. Then if I'm put to torture, I shall be able
to say honestly that I do not know who has my
books."

Silently the dim shapes passed before Bacon and
his pile of books. It took a long time. When all had
stumbled back to their seats, Bacon drew back a cur-
tain. The room was filled with bright sunlight. The
books were gone. No suspicious bulges showed under
the loose robes. Bacon stood by his empty table and
looked almost cheerful.

"That was the darkest moment," he said. "Now I
feel better. I can look forward with hope to what the
future holds for me in the few years remaining. My
friends, those books which you are concealing so loy-
ally are my legacy to the world. Some are in
plain Latin; some have their meaning slightly con-
cealed under strange words; some are in a cipher
which perhaps no one in the world will be able
to unravel. Guard them carefully. Don't try to have
them copied. The most skillful copyist will miss most
of their meaning, for some of the letters are not what
they seem.

The Doctor Mirabilis 57

"And I warn you, my friends, do not defend my
memory in public. Carry on your studies behind
closed doors, in obscure streets, with curtains over
the windows and a network of twisted language to
confuse anyone who tries to read your notes. I was
too hopeful. I thought that the Church would see
the value of my work and weigh its worth against
the continuance of its own power over the mind of
Europe. I was wrong. The Church prefers to keep
what it has. It prefers to force Christendom back into
the darkness of the past rather than to risk losing an
ounce of its power.

"Some day, perhaps when we all are dead, the new
learning will come to life again. It will creep into
the minds of churchman and layman alike. The
Pope and all his cardinals will be too weak to stand
against it. And the learning of Europe will sprout
like young wheat in spring."

Bacon sat down again, and drew his robe around
him.

"Now go, my friends," he said, "and leave me
alone. Soon they will come to take me away. I don't
want them to search you for books."

When they were all gone, Bacon sat alone and in
silence. He sat for a long time without motion. Then
came the tread of heavy boots at the door. Bacon rose

58 Crusaders of Chemistry

and went out into the courtyard. The footsteps died
away, and the laboratory was empty. The soft voice
of truth had none to listen to it now.

Such was the end of Bacon's great program. What
happened to him next we do not know. He disap-
peared from sight until 1292, when on the death of
Pope Nicholas IV, his friend Raymond Gaufredi,
the new general of the Franciscans, had him set free.
He emerged from prison an old man and nearly for-
gotten. Seventy-eight was tremendously old for those
days, and fifteen years of silence can erase the
brightest reputation. He went at once to Oxford,
where he wrote one more book. He was still firm in
his heresy, and he attacked for the last time the in-
tolerance and narrow-mindedness of the age. But his
fire was gone. He had learned nothing new, and a
few months later he died.

But Bacon's books were not dead. The cipher
works passed from hand to hand, most of them mys-
teries to the present day. Even some of those in plain
Latin escaped that favorite ecclesiastical festivity,
the bonfire of heretical works. Hidden in monasteries
where liberal abbots winked at heresy, carried about
under the robes of furtive alchemists, wandering far
away among the Saracens who never suppressed

The Doctor Mirabilis 59

heretical books, they lived an underground life, but
they lived.

Quotations from Bacon, generally without credit,
were constantly creeping to the surface to prove that
his works were still prized by the scientific-minded.
Imago Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly has a direct, word-
for-word quotation discussing the probable proximity
of Spain and India, then considered the extremities
of the world. This was cited in a letter from Colum-
bus to Ferdinand and Isabella as one of the reasons
for thinking that a voyage west into the Atlantic
might bring valuable results.

Bacon's proposed reform of the calendar remained
the best solution until Pope Gregory VIII finally
made the change. Bacon's device of omitting one leap
year in a century is still in use to-day as the nearest
practical device. Bacon's prophecy of intellectual
stagnation for Europe if his program were not
adopted came true with a vengeance. The Fourteenth
and Fifteenth centuries don't compare with the Thir-
teenth in any way. There were no men like Bacon and
Grosseteste at Oxford or Paris. Not even theologians
like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The-
ology had finished its work. Nothing remained to be
done, and the schools of Paris declined abruptly in
power while the "Doctor Subtilis," Duns Scotus, in-
toned lengthy sophistries and added a new word,

60 Crusaders of Chemistry

''dunce," to the English vocabulary. The Church sank
gradually lower and lower. Became a tool in the
hands of the kings of France, and after the Pope
returned to Rome dissolved into such worldliness and
hypocrisy that it lost all spiritual and intellectual in-
fluence.

Two hundred years after Bacon's death came the
great upheavals, the Reformation and the Renais-
sance, which went far to free both art and learn-
ing from the dead hand of the past. But until then
science was driven underground. The alchemists
wrote, but seldom published. They concealed their
discoveries in a veil of mystical language; they crept
fearfully from town to town, and carried on their
experiments behind closed doors. Bacon was the last
great liberal mind to speak up so that all the world
could hear him.

So before we go on to the great age of free thought
to come, let's take a look at those shadowy alchemists,
who through a litter of kabbalistic signs and magical
formulae kept science alive.

Alchemy

CHAPTER III
Alchemy

THE streets of medieval Paris were narrow and
twisted, but none more so than Notary St. which
led to the house of Nicolas Flamel. Near by was the
back door of the Church of St. Jacques la Boucherie,
but few worshipers went in that way. The upper
stories of the houses beetled forward into the street
until they nearly met. The paving stones were always
damp. It was dark even in daytime and inky black
at night. If you wanted to live in obscurity, this was
the place.

The house was like most others in the walled city,
dark and cramped from the painful lack of space.
But if the casual visitor should penetrate by any
chance to a certain inner hall, he'd notice a small door
with a keyhole fully three inches long. Behind it a
flight of stone stairs led down to a hidden cellar. This
was the secret laboratory of the alchemist Nicolas
Flamel. Sometimes through the door came the dull,
pulsating roar of a furnace, and sometimes the fumes
of sulphur crept out through the keyhole.

63

64 Crusaders of Chemistry

By profession Flamel was a scrivener, something
between a lawyer and a copyist He was successful,
and he earned a sufficient living. But his heart was
not in his work. After he'd copied his documents,
fixed his seals, and drawn his contracts for the day,
he'd dive into his cellar and set to work feverishly
with the weird apparatus he'd been collecting for
years. Sometimes he'd read long hours by candle-
light, trying to extract vague directions from a matrix
of misleading language. Sometimes he'd fire up his
furnace, arrange his retort, and purify by distillation
a liquid which might, actually might, contain the
Essence of the Stone.

But things didn't go very well. He kept at it for
years: learned Greek and Hebrew, perfected his
Latin, read all the major works of the Adepts of old,
penetrated deep into the mazes of the kabbala. But
the more he learned the darker the mystery grew.
Sometimes he'd take a friend into his confidence and
ask his advice. "There's nothing in it," the friend
would say, "nothing but ancient madmen trying to
cover up their ignorance with difficult words." Per-
haps he was right Perhaps . . . Flamel would stay
out of his cellar for a few days.

But never for long. His good resolutions to leave
alchemy to others and stick to his scrivening never
lasted more than a day or two. Soon he was back in

Alchemy 65

the cellar working away as hard as ever. His good
wife, Perenelle, came down sometimes, too, and sat
by the furnace with her knitting while he wrinkled
his forehead over books so obscure that their mean-
ing lay hidden completely from his hopeful eyes,
books with roots so far in the past that no one could
say for sure whether men or angels had written them.

One evening he felt very low in his mind. An ex-
periment had just failed. He'd followed directions
carefully and painfully, spent weeks heating an un-
responsive lump of copper with strong vinegar,
spirits of wine, sugar of lead, and bone-ash. Nothing
much had happened. The copper turned green, that
was all. Copper usually did that. And this copper
was supposed to turn red and glow with the brilliance
of a ruby. Disappointedly Flamel emptied the
crucible into a tub of water and sat down at his desk
where an ancient book lay open. He read silently for
a few minutes. Then he looked up. His wife had
come down the stairs, taken her usual seat, and was
working placidly at her knitting.

"It's always the same, my Perenelle," he said to his
wife, who stopped work dutifully to listen. "Always
the old books say they've given you full directions.
Just do what they say, and the Stone will appear in
your crucible. But nothing happens. Nothing but a
bad smell and a lot of charcoal burned up for noth-

66 Crusaders of Chemistry

ing. Now listen to this. Who could follow this recipe?
Yet it's from The Book of Ostanes, written by the
great Aristotle himself. Listen :

" 'A lion is reared in a forest. A man has de-
sired to use it for a mount, and he has put a
saddle on it and a bridle. Vainly he tries and can-
not succeed. He is then reduced to trying a more
clever stratagem which allows him to keep it in
solid bonds and to put on the saddle and bridle.
Then he conquers it with a whip with which he
deals it grievous blows. Later he looses it from
its bonds and makes it march like an ordinary
creature so completely that one would affirm
that it had never been savage a single day.

" 'The Stone is the Lion; the bonds are the
preparations ; the whip is the fire. What say you,
O Seeker, to a description so close?'

"Close, close! He thinks that's close." Flamel shook
his head sadly, and Perenelle returned to her knit-
ting. He read on for a time and then looked up
again.

"Perenelle," he said, to get his wife's attention.

"Yes."

"Here it is as clear as day, not the secret of the
Stone, but the reason I can't find it in any of my
books. I lack faith and knowledge of God. Listen to
this:

Alchemy 67

" The Adepts of old have defended the secret
of the Stone at the point of the sword, and have
abstained from giving it a name under which the
crowd may know it. They have disguised it
under the veil of enigmas, so that it has escaped
even penetrating spirits, and so that the most
lively intelligences have not been able to com-
prehend it, and hearts and souls have despaired
of knowing its description. There are only those
whose minds God has opened who have under-
stood it, and have been able to make it known.'

"There it is. The words in these old books mean
more than they seem to mean. But only a man whose
mind is lit up by faith can understand them. And I
have not the faith. "

"You've got as much faith as anyone," said Pere-
nelle with decision, picking up her ball of wool and
preparing to go upstairs. "You just keep on reading
and you'll see what it all means. Then you'll find the
Stone. Others have found it. Why not you?"

After his wife had gone, Flamel put his hand to
his forehead and stared at the pages before him. The
Book of Ostanes grew dim, and the letters, so faint
and old, grew blurred before his eyes. He must have
faith, he thought. Faith was the thing, not knowledge
or money or books. Faith, and the Stone would be
his.

68 Crusaders of Chemistry

Perhaps he fell asleep. He never knew for sure,
and it didn't make much difference, for in a spot of
light which approached from the distance he saw an
angel bearing a large book in his arms.

"Nicolas Flamel," said the angel, "look at this
book. You wouldn't be able to read it now, and most
men would never be able to. But some day you will
find in its pages things which no one but you will

see."

The angel disappeared in a flash of light, taking
his book with him. Flamel awoke or perhaps he
was awake already, he never knew and ran upstairs
to tell the good news to Perenelle.

"I have faith," he cried joyfully, "for God has sent
an angel to promise me a great book bound in brass.
I must keep my eyes open. God sends His gifts in all
sorts of strange ways. Perhaps the book will appear
on the shelves of some bookseller or be brought to
our very door."

For the next month Flamel kept peering into book-
stores, looking for the gleam of brass among the ordi-
nary bindings of parchment or leather. And every
time a knock came on his door, he'd rush out hoping
to see the messenger of God. At last a man came to
his house with a large and remarkable book, bound
like the angelic one in brass, with Greek letters en-
graved on the cover. Flamel offered two florins, and

Alchemy 69

the book was handed over. Its bearer disappeared,
and Flamel dived into his cellar to examine the new
treasure.

It was the angelic book all right On the title page
was an inscription in letters of gold. "Abraham the
Jew," it read, "Priest, Levite, Prince, Astrologer, and
Philosopher, sends his greetings to the nation of the
Jews long scattered by the anger of God." The pages
were not of paper or parchment, but papyrus, which
Flamel took to be the bark of small trees, and the
letters were written in various colors. Every seventh
page was a picture. The first of a virgin, the second
of a serpent swallowing her up, and so on. A fine book
it was, and enough to make any philosophical heart
jump with joy.

After Flamel had spent an hour with his book, he
decided the angel was right about the difficulty of
reading it. Besides Latin there was Greek and
Hebrew, not the ordinary varieties about which he
knew something, but strange twisted letters, words
which meant nothing, and sentences which began
well enough, but melted into nonsense before they
were half finished. The pictures were nice enough
to look at, but they meant little to poor Flamel, who
began to despair of the task he had before him.

Perenelle looked at the book too. She was very
much interested, and she wasn't at all discouraged at

70 Crusaders of Chemistry

its difficulty. It looked no worse to her than any
other book.

"Go right ahead," she said, "and read it over and
over again. Sometime you'll see what it means. You
might have those pictures copied and show them to
some of the great philosophers at the university. They
know everything."

Flamel did as his wife said. He hired an artist to
copy the pictures and took them to one philosopher
'after another. None could tell him more than he knew
already that the pictures illustrated the prepara-
tion of the Stone and were very ancient Finally he
heard of a man named Anselm who specialized in
such matters. Surely Anselm could tell him if he
wanted to.

Anselm could and did. He showed tremendous in-
terest and demanded to see the book. Flamel refused
to show it to him. Then he offered to explain the pic-
tures if Flamel would give him a tenth part of the
gold he made. Flamel agreed.

"The six pages of text between the pictures," said
Anselm, "represent six years of digestion of the
Stone. The starting point is Mercury, this God pic-
tured with wings on his heels. He is 'fixed' and his
volatility taken away by the blood of infants. Look,
here is Herod slaying the children of Bethlehem.
The Mercury is then joined with Sol and Luna and

Alchemy 71

turned into a plant like that pictured, and after-
wards corrupted into serpents. The serpents you can
see plainly. And these serpents, after being perfectly
dried, and digested, are made into a fine powder of
gold, which is the Stone. And if you don't under-
stand this discourse, you are not an Adept, and
shouldn't be reading the book at all."

Flamel was as puzzled as ever, but pretended to
understand. He went back to his laboratory and be-
gan long operations with mercury, gold, and silver.
One direction he did not follow, that of "fixing" the
mercury with the blood of infants. Such things were
not for Christians. God had made new rules for the
world since the book was written.

For years he worked on the mystery, never getting
any nearer to the secret. Twenty-two years he worked,
and his hair grew gray. The language of the book
became clear enough to him, but the meaning no
clearer than before. At the end of this time he called
Perenelle for a consultation.

"I've accomplished nothing all these years," he
said. "I'm beginning to think that Anselm told me
nothing but foolishness, hoping to discourage me and
make me give him the book. What shall I do now?"

"Ask someone else. Perhaps you'll find a learned
man who isn't also a liar."

"No one in Paris knows more about this than I do."

ji Crusaders of Chemistry

"Then go to another place. A Jew wrote this book,
and a Jew should be able to explain it. The king has
driven the Jews from Paris, but there are still Jews
in Spain. And they are very learned."

"You're right," said Flamel. "I shall go to Spain
and find a learned Jew."

Putting his business affairs in the hands of a trusted
friend, he bought a pilgrim's traveling outfit and set
out for Spain. At Leon he met the man he was look-
ing for, a learned Jew named Canches, who recog-
nized the book as one of the most ancient treasures of
his race and agreed to interpret the copies of the
illustrations in return for a promise of a look at the
book itself. Flamel made careful notes of the explana-
tions. Then they both set out for France. On the way
the Jew died, leaving Flamel alone in possession of
the secret.

Now everything was clear as day. He had the fun-
damental secret, the prima materia, and the rest was
easy. In three years, no more, he had samples of the
Stone, both the red and the white. Calling Perenelle
down into the laboratory, he made the great final ex-
periment.

His wife watched breathlessly while he heated
mercury in a crucible and threw on it a small amount
of the white powder. The mercury turned to silver,
bright and shining. He heated another portion of

Alchemy 73

mercury and this time threw on it the red powder, the
sacred Stone itself. There was a flash of yellow light,
and the mercury turned to fine gold even softer,
brighter, and more pliable than the finest gold of
the mines. Hand in hand, he and Perenelle went
across the street to the Church of St. Jacques la
Boucherie and gave thanks to God for a lifetime well
spent.

* * *

Such is the story of Nicolas Flamel, and with small
variations it might tell the tale of a thousand other
alchemists from the Roman Empire to the present
day. The same features always appear the years of
fruitless work, the angelic vision, the mysterious
book, the old magician who explains the mystery,
and finally success. The Stone is his and all the gold
he cares to make.

Naturally Flamel never told his secret. That
would be sacrilege. He'd learned it from God Him-
self and from long probings into the sacred shadows
of the past To reveal it to the world would be as
wicked as to tell the secrets of the confessional.

Of course there was only one secret, the fact that
there was no secret at all. The alchemists never made
gold ; they never lived forever ; they never had a look
at the Philosophers' Stone. But their art did not die.

74 Crusaders of Chemistry

Besides being a science, it was a religion of a sort,
and religions don't die from lack of success. It is one
of the most touching things about the human soul
that religious or semi-religious hope is not killed by a
little thing like a thousand years of failure.

Anyone who looks into the subject of alchemy will
be struck by the prominent position it occupied in
the thought of the Middle Ages. It absorbed most of
the scientific energy of the period. Among its devotees
were popes and emperors, kings, bishops, and nobles,
and down the social ladder to peasants chanting old
charms over a glittering lump of pyrites. King
Henry IV of England employed an alchemist to help
him debase the coinage of Europe. Emperor
Rudolph II kept a whole company of them busy at
Prague. Cagliostro, who was an alchemist as well as
an all-round fraud, threw France into confusion as
late as the end of the Eighteenth Century.

And strange as it may seem to the scientific-
minded, alchemy isn't dead yet. Public libraries have
numerous calls for the same books which mystified
Flamel. In every modern city live men who puzzle
over the same old enigmas, try the same old experi-
ments, with modern apparatus perhaps, but follow-
ing the same old principles which are older by far
than modern civilization. In 1929, in the most scien-
tific country on earth, an alchemist got large sums

Alchemy 75

from General Ludendorf by promising to make
enough gold to restore the Kaiser to the throne of
Germany.

Alchemy was the father of chemistry, and it's
hardly surprising that the father continued to live in
fair health long after the birth of his eldest son. It's
hardly surprising either that the son, chemistry,
showed in his early years a good many resemblances
to his father. Without some slight knowledge of
alchemy and the intellectual soil in which it grew, it
would be impossible to understand such men as Para-
celsus, Boyle, and Priestley, all great men, all rank-
ing high in the history of legitimate science, and all
showing the influence of alchemy.

The story of alchemy takes us far back into the re-
mote past There is good evidence that it came first,
like so many other things, from China. Certainly the
Chinese were hard at it long before it was heard of
in Europe. Chinese alchemy was an outgrowth of
Taoism, which was founded in the Sixth Century
B.C. by Lao Tzu, the "Venerable Philosopher" who
was born after a gestation of eighty years with a long
white beard and the features of an elderly man. The
vague and peculiar theories of Lao Tzu do not con-
cern us here, but after a short period his followers
developed a mystical science whose resemblances to
European alchemy are so striking that they need little

76 Crusaders of Chemistry

pointing out. Both, for instance, had two main ob-
jectives, to make gold from base metals and to pro-
long human life. Both believed that metals "grew"
in the earth. Both used the same mystical expressions
such as "philosophical" mercury and "philosophical"
lead. Both searched for a Philosophers' Stone. And
Chinese and Europeans alike clothed their work in a
figurative language designed to keep its real mean-
ing from the vulgar. Or, as the vulgar said, to con-
ceal the fact that there was nothing to conceal.

The date of alchemy's arrival in the West con-
firms strongly the theory of its Chinese origin. There
had been a good deal of "gold making" in Egypt
from the earliest times, many recipes of which have
survived, but Egyptian "gold making" was not true
alchemy, only a process of adulteration still practised
no doubt wherever cheap jewelry is manufactured.
True alchemy didn't stoop to such practices, at least
not in theory, and true alchemy didn't appear in
Europe until an embassy from Marcus Aurelius An-
toninus (An Tun, the Chinese called him) arrived
in Indo China in 166 A. D. and established trade
between the two empires. Alchemy moved west with
the silk and jade of China, appearing first in those
cities, Alexandria and Constantinople, which con-
trolled the trade with the East. By the end of the
Third Century it was so popular throughout the

Alchemy 77

Roman world that the Emperor Diocletian, fearing
the effects on the currency if the alchemists should
succeed in making gold, ordered all books relating to
it to be destroyed. This prohibition, like most others,
had only a temporary effect, and alchemy, becoming
more mystical as it grew in popularity, took its place
with the numerous Eastern sects which struggled
shrilly with Christianity for possession of decadent
Rome.

The history of alchemy is one of the most baffling
and maddening subjects in existence, and each scholar
who is rash enough to grapple with it emerges with
a different conclusion, or more frequently none at all.
Some consider it a religion and work it into the
gaudy fabric of theosophy and the "secret doctrine."
Others treat it as an embryo science and try without
success to translate its mystical language, its Green
Lion, its Goose of Hermogenes, into sober chemical
formulae. Others call it a "popular delusion" and let
it go at that, which of course is begging the question.
Alchemy was too important, has played too large a
part in the intellectual life of a thousand years, to be
so lightly put aside.

Most modern scientists look down
from a great height. Scientists are nj#
row-minded in some respects, and j^e&^ttitude to^
ward any system of thought

78 Crusaders of Chemistry

usually intolerant. The alchemists, judged by mod-
ern standards, look very ignorant and foolish, but we
have no right to judge one age by the standards of
another. Alchemy, with its mysticism, its numerous
frauds, and its habit of degenerating into a singularly
unsatisfactory kind of religion, was the product of
two tremendous handicaps with which modern
science does not have to contend. These were an un-
productive and backward-looking intellectual phi-
losophy and the unfortunate choice of objectives
impossible to attain. This combination would be
enough to discourage any scientist and turn him into
a mystic.

Alchemy didn't get started until the classical age
was long past its intellectual prime. Decay had be-
gun, and while the barbarians of the West were bat-
tering the frontiers, the religions of the East had al-
ready invaded and conquered the intellectual empire
of Greece and Rome. And wherever they touched
they cast a blight from which the world did not re-
cover for a thousand years or more. Christianity
wasn't the first of these or the last. It was merely the
winner. Isis led the ancient cults of Egypt to the
glorious assault Mithra stalked out of Asia. The
Greek mysteries, long kept down by the deadly
weapon of tolerant amusement, began to be taken
seriously. Judaism, harsh and cruel as always, gained

Alchemy 79

much power if few converts. Even the philosophy of
the Greeks slid backwards into the silly confusion of
almost-Christian Neoplatonism. Aristotle, no doubt,
turned in his grave daily.

By the time the barbarians actually arrived to over-
whelm the Western Empire, the classical culture had
developed the habit of looking backwards for its
inspiration and authority. This was natural and in-
evitable. For a long time the world had been on the
down grade and everybody knew it. Civil order had
disappeared; anarchy was spreading. Language and
literature were sinking. The military power of the
empire had evaporated. And the tolerant old religion
which pleased the common people without hamper-
ing the educated was dying under the assault of vari-
ous cults which neither believed in toleration nor
practised it. The poets tried feebly to imitate Virgil ;
the philosophers, such as they were, repeated dimly
the thoughts of the old masters ; the jurists simplified
the law, threw away its finer subtleties, incorporated
barbarous doctrines better suited to barbarous minds,
and watched the highly organized Roman Empire
sink to a confusion of wandering tribes and isolated
villages. No wonder men looked backward. In the
present was confusion; the future promised worse.
Only in the past were order, peace, beauty, and
knowledge.

8o Crusaders of Chemistry

Such was the background of the Roman Church,
the mighty institution which arose to organize
Europe on a new pattern. It looked backward to a
golden age in the past, and forward only to glory
in another world. "No use to teach hope for this
world," said the Church. "This world is past hope.
Things are getting worse and will continue to do so.
Soon will come the final catastrophe. Gabriel will
blow his horn, and the whole futile business of
worldly life will pass forever into the hands of a
supernatural receiver. The next world will be better
for some and worse for others. But there's no hope
whatever this side of the grave."

Gabriel, of course, didn't blow his horn on sche-
dule, and as the years passed, people lost faith in the
impending destruction of the world. But they didn't
stop looking backward. The habit was too strong.
They could see for themselves the dim outlines of
great things gone forever. Their own efforts were so
feeble in comparison. They pored over the surviving
fragments of ancient learning with worshipful ven-
eration. Perhaps if they searched, and studied, and
tried to understand, they might approach if not equal
the learning of the great men who'd been dead for so
many years. The Church tried to focus this atten-
tion on the Scriptures and the Church Fathers. To a
great extent she succeeded. But these authorities are

Alchemy 81

notoriously deficient in practical information, and
other books existed, some of them far older than the
Church or its Fathers. To these turned the groping
medieval scientists. Medieval Alchemy was born
with its eyes in the back of its head. It hoped to dis-
cover the secrets of the past nothing more. No re-
search as we know it. That would be useless. No hope
of progressing beyond the discoveries of the past.
That would be folly and presumption. If they could
only regain what had been lost, that would be enough.

But this timidity, this lack of faith in their own
ability to discover new facts, was not alchemy's only
handicap. There was still another and a greater
the obsessed determination to make gold. The his-
tory of this attempt carries us back to the first stir-
rings of civilization.

Gold was always admired and coveted. It was the
only available metal which remained bright in use.
Its color identified it with the sun, which all primi-
tive races worshiped in some form. It was easily
worked into ornaments, and it became the chief
medium of exchange almost as soon as money was
invented. Greed, love of beauty, religion, and
political economy combined forces to make gold the
most desirable of primitive commodities.

There was no real reason to suppose that gold
could not be made from other materials. Other metals

82 Crusaders of Chemistry

could. Bronze, for instance, which differs from cop-
per and tin as much as they differ from each other.
And useful substances like glass which existed
nowhere on earth until men learned to mix certain
earths and melt them together. The modern critic
protests that these substances are not elements like
gold, but the idea of a chemical element appeared
only in recent times and grew very slowly to its pres-
ent authority. The reasoning of the ancients was per-
fectly logical. They made various things they
wanted. Why couldn't they make gold, which they
wanted most of all?

So the alchemists set to work with a supply of
hope and determination which lasted several thou-
sand years and is not entirely gone to-day. At first
their methods were simple. They experimented with
alloys, hoping to find that gold was a mixture of other
metals. Certain alloys, such as those containing cop-
per and antimony, resemble gold very closely. But
none was satisfactory, and the alchemists moved on
to other fields.

They gathered rare minerals and tried to extract
gold from them, reasoning correctly enough that if
copper exists in the earth both as a metal and as an
ore, gold might do the same. No luck here either.
The minerals yielded various strange things, but no
gold.

Alchemy 83

So the alchemists arranged the known metals ac-
cording to their resemblance to gold. There were
"base" metals and "noble" metals. Lead came
lowest. It tarnished almost at once and had little bril-
liance, malleability, or resistance to superficial oxida-
tion. Next came iron. It tarnished, too, but was more
brilliant and malleable. Then copper, and so on.
Silver was next to gold, almost as noble. And gold
was the king of metals, perfect, shining, incorrupt-
ible. It seemed likely that if Nature had made the
metals in a series leading gradually up to gold, she
must have some way of changing one metal into an-
other.

Here's where the doctrine of the Philosophers'
Stone entered to complicate the situation. The Stone
was the marvelous reagent which could "transmute"
a base metal into a noble one. The idea is a very old
one, and it became very early the central doctrine of
alchemy. The secret was supposed to have been lost
centuries ago, or to be known only to certain
"Adepts" who were jealously keeping it from the
public. The Stone might be anything on earth, or
something not on the earth of ordinary human ex-
perience.

First the alchemists looked among the minerals.
They tried every conceivable reagent which could
be made from them. They had great faith in long-

84 Crusaders of Chemistry

continued heat and developed furnaces which could
maintain a high temperature indefinitely. Sometimes
they heated the same mixture for years on end, al-
though this meant keeping a man at the bellows day
and night Still no result.

Far from being discouraged the alchemists started
off on another tack. Nature is one, they reasoned. She
is a unit, indivisible. What she does with living plants
she can also do with the metals which grow in the
earth as plants grow on the surface. Therefore the
Philosophers' Stone may be some sort of vegetable
substance which speeds up the growth of a metal as
manure speeds up the growth of a plant. They
searched high and low for the "philosophical
manure," tried every conceivable vegetable substance
they could lay their hands on. Still no gold.

Next they tried animal substances, for animals con-
tain even more of the mysterious essence of life than
plants do. They collected dried toads, small black
lizards, blood of bats, human brains, eyes of the
basilisk from the deserts of Africa. They tried all
these things, still full of hope, still sure that the secret
lay only a little beyond their reach. But they got no
gold.

By this time a good many of the alchemists had
given up purely material methods and branched off
into magic and mysticism. The Church taught that

Alchemy 85

God had worked miracles in the past and could do
so still if He chose. He certainly could give the secret
of the Stone to those who loved and served Him. So
the alchemists became ascetics, monks t and hermits.
They fasted rigorously and divided their time be-
tween prayers and experiments, hoping daily that
God would modify some simple reaction and make
it produce the Stone instead of ordinary cinnabar or
verdigris. But God paid no attention. The strictest
hermit got no more gold than the merriest worldling
who worked in the tavern and hired the pretty bar-
maid to tend his furnace.

"Well," said the alchemists, "perhaps the Church
has been deceiving us all these years. Perhaps we've
been praying to the wrong God. There were faiths
before Christ, before Moses, before Abraham. Per-
haps the old gods can do what the God of Holy
Church cannot or will not. Let's give the old gods a
chance."

With faltering steps and many misgivings they dug
into the darkness behind them and resurrected the
long-dead gods of the past: Zeus, Moloch, Baal, Isis,
and Indra. Secretly the old books stole out of their
hiding places; old rites were celebrated, and the
alchemists fearfully, in terror of excommunication
or worse, set up hidden altars to strange deities. But
Moloch helped them no more than Jehovah, and

86 Crusaders of Chemistry

Isis produced no more gold than the gentle Jesus,
who probably didn't approve of alchemy anyway.

The next step was a terrible one, and a man had
to be brave to take it. The Church taught that God
was all-powerful but was He? There was evil in
the world, plenty of it. This must mean that the devil
was still active in spite of the power of God. Per-
haps the devil, not God, had jurisdiction over the
metals in the earth. It was worth trying anyway.
There were plenty of devils. Holy Church herself
taught that, and it ought to be easy to get their atten-
tion.

Black magic this was, and dangerous. The
alchemists worked secretly in caves, in the depths of
forests, in cellars and abandoned dungeons. They
wrote charms in virgins' blood, recited the Lord's
Prayer backwards, celebrated the Black Mass and
the Witches' Sabbath. But still no gold. Neither
Satan nor his lesser devils appeared to help them.

This was the end. There was nothing more to try,
and genuine alchemy died gradually of discourage-
ment. The mystical side of the art lived on and still
lives to-day in the doctrines of theosophy and other
cults. The alchemist charlatans continued to fool the
gullible with stories of sudden wealth gained by fol-
lowing the directions of some mysterious book. But
the traditional alchemy declined from loss of hope.

A TYPICAL ALCHMV1ICAL RKCIPL

My Son, I was dead without thee

And lived in great danger of my life.

I revive at thy return

And it fills my breast with Joy

Hut when the Son entered the Father's house,

The Father took him to his heart

And swallowed him out of excessive Joy

And that with his own mouth

The great exertion makes him sweat.

From the "HOOK oh LAMRIRH"

Alchemy 87

Its devotees drifted into other sciences. And when
Paracelsus burst out of Switzerland shouting that
the true object of alchemy was not to make gold, but
to prepare medicines to cure the ills of mankind, the
best of the alchemists followed him in the first at-
tempt to organize into a real science the rich ac-
cumulation of chemical facts which the alchemists
had discovered in the course of their search for gold.
A thousand years they had worked, two thousand per-
haps, without material pay, without the faintest
shadow of success. For a thousand years they had
served a cruel mistress who never gave them a single
smile for all their devotion. Fools, most people call
them now, and fools they were perhaps. But if they
had worked less devotedly, less hopefully, the world
would be without the science of chemistry which
means so much to it now.

The Medical Luther

CHAPTER IV
The Medical Luther

IN THE Sixteenth Century all the southgoing
traffic of Germany headed for the Brenner Pass,
for at the Brenner the Alps are absent-minded,
leaving an easy passage between northern Europe
and the rich plains of Venetia. It was an age of great
coming and going and the Brenner Road hummed
with activity. In Italy the Renaissance was at its
apex, spreading new ideas, new riches, new luxury
over the gloomy North. In Germany the Reforma-
tion was getting under way with its train of war and
confusion. The Brenner connected these two centers
of change, and the concentrated life of Europe
crowded up the narrow valley, over the low pass,
and down to the plains on the other side. Troops of
soldiers, trains of pack horses, papal legates, mer-
chants, gypsies, wanderers of all sorts all came
through the Brenner. The towns along the road were
the grandstands of Europe. From their doorways
could be watched the whole glittering pageant of a

reawakened world.

91

92, Crusaders of Chemistry

At Innsbruck the road branches, part going west to
Augsburg and the Rhine, part continuing down the
valley of the Inn to the Danube, Vienna, and Prague.
On this lower branch stands the little town of
Schwartz, on one side a fertile valley, on the other
the mountains crowding out into the river as if they
resented its passage through them. It's a sleepy little
place in this Twentieth Century, although the Bren-
ner, steel-shod now, still carries the freight of
Europe. But in the early Fifteen Hundreds it
hummed with feverish activity. Veins of ore had been
discovered in the surrounding mountains, and the .
counts of Fiigen were exploiting them with all the
uneasy vigor of the age. The forests were full of char-
coal burners, the valley was blue with wood smoke,
and the travelers on the great road stopped curiously
to peer at the glowing forges and the copper bars
piled ready for shipment down into rich Italy below
the pass.

Along the dusty road from Innsbruck one sum-
mer day in 1516 came a foot-traveler with a battered
knapsack on his back. He walked with an eager bird-
like gait, head moving a little with each stride. He
was slender and sickly looking, perhaps twenty-two
years old, with the thinnest sort of scraggly beard
growing in small patches on his chin. His clothes
were rough and coarse ; he wore no hat, and his head

The Medical Luther 93

projected forward as if his mind were more anxious
than his body to reach its destination. He looked or-
dinary enough in the distance, but when he came
near it didn't take much penetration to see that this
( was no common wanderer. From his thin face the eyes
looked out with such devouring eagerness that trav-
elers who passed him on the road looked back and
stared as if they'd seen a ghost. He was Theophras-
tus Bombast Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus
Bombastus von Hohenheim, surnamed Paracelsus,
to use his full name, which he never did son of a
doctor at Villach in Carinthia, student of alchemy,
medicine, and other things, and collector of miscel-
laneous knowledge along the by-ways of Europe. He
stopped in the town square, inquired for the manager
of the mines, took a folded letter from his pocket,
and disappeared into one of the smelter buildings.
The mine school of the Fugers had gained its most
famous pupil.

The outfit at Schwartz would now be called an "in-
dustrial research laboratory." It was not the first of
its kind by any means. The Fuggers of Augsburg,
for instance, had maintained a mine school at Vil-
lach for years, and Paracelsus's father was the official
doctor who treated burns from molten metal and
crushed hands from falling rock. But Schwartz had
a feature which made it almost modern. In a build-

94 Crusaders of Chemistry

ing just outside the mine mouth worked a group of
theoretical alchemists, distilling, subliming, and
calcining to their hearts' content. The counts of
Fiigen were practical men with little hope of find-
ing the Philosophers' Stone, but they did hope that
the alchemists would extract copper, zinc, or some-
thing else salable from the promising but refractory
ores which veined the mountainside. And in holding
this hope, they were doing just what the General
Electric and the Du Fonts do to-day. Paracelsus
found at Schwartz the meeting place of theoretical
alchemy and practical chemistry. It was this oppor-
tunity which started him off on his career of injecting
new and somewhat hectic life into the science of his
day.

He was a strange character, this wandering stu-
dent. Like so many great men, he was one of those
freaks whose eccentricity keeps them from sinking
down into the soft featherbed of comfortable medi-
ocrity, like a crow with a white wing feather unable
to live in peace with his normal fellows. Paracelsus
was restless, unfriendly, a life-long wanderer, almost
an outcast. His friendships were all on the intel-
lectual plane, never on the normal plane of ordinary
human affection. He was foul-mouthed, vindictive,
utterly tactless, leaving behind him a trail of enemies

The Medical Luther 95

buzzing like angry bees and swearing murder and
sudden death if he should ever return.

There's a story which would account for his ex-
traordinary bitterness and hatred for all the world.
It sounds unlikely on its face, but is so persistent and
so backed up with indirect evidence that it may be
true.

The tale goes that when Paracelsus was two years
old, the backwash of a small war came through the
village of Einsiedeln where his father was the local
doctor. Soldiers were quartered in the houses of the
villagers, and the house of the doctor was afflicted
with more than the usual quota. The whole troop
made it their headquarters during their stay and pro-
ceeded to enjoy themselves. They got drunk, can-
vassed the town for attractive young women, broke
the furniture, maltreated the servants, and were gen-
erally true to type. The night before they moved on,
they had a grand party in the doctor's house. There
was no feminine entertainment. The townspeople
had fled to the shepherds' huts in the mountains.
Only the doctor stayed behind, mindful of his duty
to the sick and hoping the soldiers would do no harm
to an old man and his fatherless boy. He went to the
child's bedroom and waited in terror while the party
grew drunker and noisier as the night wore on.

Toward midnight things got a bit dull. There was

96 Crusaders of Chemistry

nothing more to drink. The soldiers hunted around
the house for amusement, and one of them came on
the doctor's case of surgical instruments. He took
them out and tried them on the woodwork. Then he
had a drunken inspiration.

"I'm a surgeon myself," he cried. "I used to work
for a barber. Come here, you men, I'll bleed you."

None of the other soldiers would let him experi-
ment on them, but the idea was too good to waste.
They rushed up the stairs to the bedroom, knocked
the old man unconscious, snatched up the child,
stretched him out on the dining-room table and cas-
trated him with one of his father's scalpels. Then,
frightened at what they'd done and somewhat
sobered, they ran out into the street. The father
came down just in time to save his child from bleed-
ing to death, nursed him back to health, and watched
him grow up into a sickly young man condemned to
a life of abnormality and solitude.

Such a story seems hard to believe, but in view of
the general character of professional soldiers and
the general character of the Fifteenth Century it is
far from incredible. And there are many things about
Paracelsus to indicate that he was abnormal sexually,
whether because of violence or from natural causes.
He never had a real beard although some of his
portraits show a feeble attempt at one. His skull,

The Medical Luther 97

which is still preserved, resembles a woman's more
than it does a man's. He never married. He hated
women of all sorts. And although his dissoluteness
was shouted by his enemies from the housetops of
Europe, he was never accused of lechery, the favorite
vice of the Renaissance.

A man with such a handicap lives a little outside
the world. The ordinary roads to happiness and con-
tentment are closed, and he's apt to throw himself
into some abstract activity with all the strength that's
in him. Not a pleasant character, this Paracelsus.
Not a man for cheerful conversations by the hearth.
Not a man to drink beer with on warm summer eve-
nings. But just the explosive needed in the Sixteenth
Century to blast alchemy, chemistry, and medicine
out of their destinationless ruts.

The two groups at Schwartz, alchemists and mine
workers, didn't think much of each other, and Para-
celsus didn't think much of either. "Gold cookers"
he called the first, "blacksmiths" he called the second.
He worked alone, taking no one into his confidence
and almost rejoicing in the hatred stirred up J^yjis
bitter tactlessness. /< '\ Q : ^

In general he took more interest in>'%? .practical

jL'"' '

work of the metallurgists than he dia in the ya^fit
f umblings of the alchemists, for a verjf btjije fje&aigiqg.- 1
tion told him that the "gold cookery ^

98 Crusaders of Chemistry

plishing nothing at all. He'd rush into a mine when
the news came that a new kind of ore had been dis-
covered, secure a sample, take it back to his labora-
tory, crush it in a mortar, and try all sorts of reagents
on it to see what would happen. Needless to say,
neither he nor anyone else at the time had a clear
idea of the nature of chemical composition, but cer-
tain simple observations could be made. Ores differed
widely even when they contained the same metal,
and the mine workers treated them in different ways.
Some they roasted in the open air before smelting in
the furnaces. Some they did not. Paracelsus tried
hard to discover the reasons, but he got little informa-
tion. The metallurgists followed traditional rules
developed by the trial-and-error method. They hadn't
the faintest idea why their operations failed or suc-
ceeded.

"Now Herr Bleiberg," he'd say to a foreman
standing beside a pile of green ore, "what kind of
stone is that?"

"That's green-stone."

"What metal comes from it?"

"Copper."

"How do you get this copper?"

"We roast it in the open air for half a day; then
melt it with charcoal in the tall clay furnace."

"But there are other green stones."

The Medical Luther 99

"Yes. Some we treat the same; some differently."

"How do you tell them apart?"

"Sometimes by the weight. Sometimes we can't tell
at all."

"Then what do you do?"

"Try everything and hope something works."

"And does everything fail sometimes?"

"Often."

"Do the alchemists help you any?"

The foreman would laugh derisively. "Those old
fools! They heat the stuff for a month, make a lot of
smoke, and get a mess they call 'philosophical copper'
that a tinsmith wouldn't take for a gift. To hell with
them!"

In a long low building worked the alchemists.
Numerous furnaces stood about. The air was thick
with fumes and sour with suspicion. When Para-
celsus entered he would be met with a wave of
hostility.

"Well, cooks," he'd sneer, "how's the soup to-day?
Any gold yet?"

The outraged alchemists would turn on him
angrily. "Throw him out," would come from the
back of the room.

"Let me by," Paracelsus would cry. "I've got as
much right here as you have. My furnace is here,
and I've got lots of stuff you could use if you knew

ioo Crusaders of Chemistry

how. I haven't any old books to stick my nose into all
day long, and you'd be better off if you hadn't either.
Now let me by. I've got work to do."

He'd go to his corner and start grinding up ore
with his mortar and pestle. At intervals he'd grin
over his shoulder.

"Look, Brother Heinrich, there's gold in your
crucible. Philosophical gold, too, worth a thousand
ducats an ounce."

But Heinrich had been fooled too many times. He
would glare into his furnace, swallow his rage, and
hope for revenge. Such a scoffer! No wonder the
great secret eluded them. Half the work was develop-
ing the proper faith, the proper reverence for the
Adepts of old. You couldn't develop faith with that
gadfly buzzing around.

Paracelsus worked hard, and the rocks of the
mountainside rewarded him well. He began to
classify them by their reactions. This one gave off
an "air" when stirred up with oil of vitriol. This one
turned black in the furnace. This one gave bright
crystals of copper when dissolved in aqua fortts and
stirred with an iron rod. No real discoveries yet No
light on the deep mystery of why the ores changed
in the furnace into metal and slag. The subject was
too vast. He realized he'd only begun.

Day by day the alchemists grew more hostile.

The Medical Luther 101

Paracelsus did nothing to conciliate them. Perhaps
he didn't know how. Scornful as ever, he peeked over
their shoulders, laughed at their prayers and incanta-
tions, mocked the mystical language of their books.
One morning the crisis came. They moved on him
in a body, grabbed him by the collar and trousers,
and pitched him out into the sunlight. He rubbed
his bruises, shouted back some elaborate curses, and
walked off resentfully. Perhaps he ought to complain
to the manager. Keep up his prestige. But what was
the use? What did he hope to discover in that stink-
ing place? Nothing but a few practical rules to
enrich an ignorant count who'd spend the money on
his soldiers or his mistresses. Bah! It wasn't worth
doing. No inspiration in it. No reward for the spirit.
He sat down on a pile of slag and looked into the
valley where the Brenner Road lay shimmering in
the heat, dusty with the coming and going of
Europe.

As he sat and watched the traffic below, a great
eagerness came over him to be on the road himself
to Bavaria, Bohemia, the plains of the North,
perhaps the distant countries beyond. "There's my
university," he thought. "There are my teachers.
They know a lot, and they won't tell me lies."

A tinsmith came by on a donkey hung about with
pots and pans. Paracelsus looked him over carefully.

IO2 Crusaders of Chemistry

"That man now! He's old and poor and driven
from place to place with blows and curses. But he
knows about solder and fluxes. He knows what you
can do with copper and what you can do with lead.
He can teach me."

Two merchants came next with pack mules heavily
loaded. A soldier rode ahead and one behind. Para-
celsus watched them into the distance.

"From Venice, probably. Valuable goods, too, or
they wouldn't have the soldiers. Silk and brocade
from Cathay. Spice from the Indies. Merchants see
a lot. They know the Turks and the Tartars, the
Persians and the Hindus. They've seen the holy men
on the banks of the Holy Ganges. They can teach

me."

Then a troop of cavalry riding up to the pass and
Italy. Glitter of armor, clatter of swords, froth on
the horses' mouths, and a cloud of dust trailing off
down the road. Paracelsus shuddered. Those savages,
scattering murder and rape but they, too, know a
lot.

"They know wounds and death," he thought.
"They've seen the moment when the soul flies out of
the body. They know which thrusts kill, which
wounds heal and which fester. They can teach me."

He sprang to his feet and ran to his lodging to
gather up his few belongings knapsack, dagger,

The Medical Luther 103

heavy boots, a case of drugs and surgical instru-
ments. Then he went to the alchemists' laboratory
and stuck his head in at the door.

"Good-bye, you pastry cooks," he shouted. "You're
rid of me now. Good-bye, you swindlers. I'm leaving.
Good-bye, you stinking sulphur burners. I'm going
to learn from gypsies, robbers, hangmen. They all
know more than you do. Good-bye, you blind moles.
The mines will be my books and the taverns my
university. Boil your gold powder. Raise your
stenches. I'll be gone."

A shout of rage came from the laboratory, and
the alchemists rushed out, blinking their eyes like
owls in the sunlight. But Paracelsus was on the
Brenner Road, his feet shuffling the dust, and his
thoughts reaching out ahead to Germany, to Sweden,
to all the world.

The road taught much in those days. Theory
among the learned was weak, moribund, paralyzed
by mystical fairy tales and the search for a non-
existent Philosophers' Stone. But as in the time of
Roger Bacon, the working people possessed practical
knowledge of tremendous value. In their daily work
they used principles of chemistry, physics, and
medicine which the serious scholars in the univer-
sities had never heard of. Glass workers knew secrets
of chemistry, midwives secrets of medicine, and

IO4 Crusaders of Chemistry

gypsies knew secrets of hypnotism and dark secrets
of what would now be called "abnormal psychology."
Even at the present time there's plenty of such knowl-
edge still to be gathered, but in the Sixteenth Century
the surface had hardly been scratched.

Up and down Europe went Paracelsus, paying his
way by healing the sick, giving chemical information
to those who could use it, and selling drugs of his
own preparation. He had a natural talent for medi-
cine, and although without formal training, was al-
ready a skilled physician. He had, moreover, an
asset possessed by few doctors of the period the
habit of accurate and searching observation. "The
books of the doctor," he'd say, "are the sick," and he
followed his own advice rigorously. Nothing got
by him. He'd ask all sorts of questions which the
other doctors considered silly or useless. What the
sick man dreamed about; whether he was married;
what he thought about religion; what he did for a
living ; what his mother and father died of ; whether
he had any children ; whether he drank wine or beer.
Nothing was too small or remote for the penetrating
curiosity of Paracelsus. He observed each case
minutely and filed the experience away in the back
of his mind to use when the chance came. Every
tavern, every village had at least one sick person,
and each morning, setting out on his road, he was

The Medical Luther 105

richer in practical knowledge and better able to
live up to the reputation which began to grow around
him.

In every good-sized town he came to he yvas sure
to find after a little discreet inquiry a group of
alchemists working vaguely but hopefully on the age-
old problem of the transmutation of metals. There
were fashions in procedure, but the spirit of the
science had changed little through the centuries.
The oldest authorities were still considered the best.
Hermes Trismegistus and the Turba Philosophorum
were thumbed over reverently as the most sacred
revelations of the art. Various interpretations were
given to murky passages, and most of the passages
were murky. There were several contentious schools
of thought. But one thing all the alchemists had in
common. They were all uniformly unsuccessful. No
gold appeared in their crucibles; no sacred Stone
gleamed like a ruby among the cooling ashes of their
furnaces. They had worked for a thousand years,
perhaps two thousand. But no slightest success had
rewarded their efforts.

Paracelsus ingratiated himself with the various
groups, learned what he could of their secrets, and
fared forth again on his travels. Each time he be-
came more convinced that alchemy was dying of
discouragement and under-nutrition. It needed a new

106 Crusaders of Chemistry

objective with a more definite promise of success.
If it had some reasonable but still inspiring goal it
might come to life again and arrange into a useful
body of knowledge the scattered facts which the
secretive alchemists now hid so carefully from each
other and the public. The practical tasks of the mine
workers and artisans were not lofty enough. In-
dustrialism was not yet spelled with a capital letter;
it attracted few of the really fine minds. Alchemy
would have to find a new task worthy of its high
ideals or die under the weight of a thousand years of
constant failure.

This task was ready and waiting, but before Para-
celsus no one had brought it forcibly to the attention
of the alchemists. From the beginning the science
had had two objects the first to make gold from base
metals, the second to lengthen human life. Gold mak-
ing, perhaps because of the unusual greed (now
called economic sense)' of the North European
nations, had gradually come to dominate the whole
science to such an extent that the prolongation of
life was almost forgotten. But not entirely. Here and
there an alchemist, discouraged by his failure in the
first quest, would vaguely try to accomplish the
second. Mystical elements entered the theory.
Lengthening of human life was modified into per-
fecting the soul. The Philosophers' Stone accumu-

The Medical Luther 107

lated new properties. Not only could it turn lead into
gold, but it could also assure perfect health, cure
diseases, even make its possessor immortal. The Stone
became the type of the perfect drug. The stage was
set for the great project of Paracelsus, to divert the
energies of alchemy from transmutation of metals to
the preparation of medicines for the immediate ad-
vantage of the human race.

To the modern mind it seems natural and rational
to apply chemical methods to the preparation of
drugs. Most of our drugs are of chemical origin or
prepared by chemical methods. But the mental atti-
tude of the Sixteenth Century in regard to medicine
was very different. The human body was still con-
sidered sacred and almost divine. The Church for-
bade dissection under the most ferocious penalties,
and consequently little was known about the internal
organs. The most popular opinion was that disease
came either from God or the devil, and could there-
fore be cured only by theological methods prayer
and fasting, and particularly giving money to the
Church.

Of course the doctors of the late Middle Ages
didn't agree entirely with this theory of the divine
origin of disease. To do so would deliver the pro-
fession of medicine completely into the hands of the
priests. But instead of observing for themselves the

io8 Crusaders of Chemistry

symptoms and effects of disease, they preferred, with
the lack of self-confidence so characteristic of the
period, to dig back into the past and collect such
fragments of Greek medical science as had been
saved by the Arabs and transmitted to Europe
through Spain. Galen was the most authoritative
of the ancient writers and his hundred treatises with
their Arabian commentaries formed the framework
of the medieval theory of medicine.

The principles of Galenism were simple enough.
The body was supposed to contain four fluids or
"humors" analogous to the four elements of Aris-
totle earth, air, fire, and water. Disease was caused
by an excess or deficiency of one of these. The cure,
usually consisting of bleeding, purges, baths, and
decoctions of aromatic herbs, aimed to restore the
balance. This is wrong enough to start with, but by
the Sixteenth Century Galenism had accumulated
a mass of superstition which almost concealed the
original theory. Every religion in the known world
contributed charms and exorcisms. Every plant that
grew had a place in the pharmacopoeia. A numerous
hierarchy of assorted devils presided over each dis-
ease. And the doctor who tried to apply a simple
and rational treatment was denounced as an ignor-
amus who didn't understand the fine points of his
trade.

The Medical Luther 109

Such was medical science in the youth of Para-
celsus a backward-looking dogmatism, far from
reality and getting farther all the time. From the
Orient, from newly discovered America came strange
diseases. Syphilis swept across Europe like a plague,
twisting the bones of king and peasant alike. The
rapid economic changes of the period brought new
ailments to light. Lead poisoning from the increased
use of paint, gangrene from the ragged wounds of
gunpowder warfare. The Galenic doctors had no
new remedies. They turned over the pages of Avi-
cenna, Mesue, Averrhoes, chanted the age-old
formulae, prescribed the age-old remedies, and
watched their patients die with discouraging regu-
larity. Here and there a doctor would stumble on a
new drug or treatment which gave good results. But
like as not he'd look through the books of the ancient
authorities and, finding no precedent, cast it aside
for fear of being denounced by the orthodox.

Imagine a large warehouse full of goods of all
sorts jumbled together in small rooms, uncounted,
unclassified, unknown to the public. And a depart-
ment store with plenty of customers, plenty of money
in the till, but selling nothing but dirty old rags,
broken bottles, and generally failing to deliver even
these to the customers who paid for them. Such
were alchemy and medicine in the Sixteenth Century.

no Crusaders of Chemistry

The alchemists knew a great deal about what we
now call chemistry, more than they're generally
given credit for, but they made no practical use of
their facts. The search for the Stone was a will-o'-
the-wisp leading them deeper and deeper into a
quagmire of profitless mysticism. Practical knowl-
edge of chemical compounds was regarded as merely
a means to an end, and an end which had never been
even in sight. Medicine on the other hand was in-
tellectually moribund. The doctors did no research
at all, relying on the remote past for their informa-
tion. The whole science was at a standstill. The
doctors followed the traditional procedure, shut their
eyes to new discoveries, and repelled with righteous
indignation any suggestion that they learn from the
old wives, traveling quacks, and gypsies who often
cured when they failed. The doctors needed a new
stock of knowledge, new drugs, new methods. The
alchemists possessed just these things. Paracelsus,
traveling around Europe with his eyes open, was the
first to break down the rigid wall which separated
the two sciences.

He didn't stay long in one country, but wandered
about as he heard of new diseases, new cures.

"Sicknesses [he said] travel here and there
through the whole length of the world and do
not remain in one place. If a man wishes to un-

The Medical Luther in

derstand them, he must travel too. Does not
travel give more understanding than sitting
behind the stove? A doctor must be an alchemist.
He must see the mother earth where the min-
erals grow, and as the mountains won't come
to him, he must go to the mountains. Is it a
reproach that I have sought the minerals and
found their mind and heart and kept the knowl-
edge of them fast, so as to know how to separate
the clean from the ore? To do this I have come
through many hardships."

He didn't avoid the universities, but treated them
as sources of information, less reliable perhaps than
the simple people of the road, but not to be despised.
He never stayed at one very long, draining it dry
of information and stirring up such hatred with his
unconcealed contempt that he soon had to be on
his way again.

"Universities do not teach all things, so a
doctor must seek out old wives, sorcerers, wan-
dering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and
take lessons from them. We must seek for our-
selves, travel through the countries and ex-
perience much, and when we have experienced
all sorts of things, we must hold fast to that
which is good."

Such a theory takes a man far afield. He went to
Sweden to pry into the secrets which made Swedish

H2 Crusaders of Chemistry

iron the best in Europe. To the Cossacks who smear
their wounds with a mixture of gunpowder, pitch,
and brandy. To the Tartars who make healing
medicine out of mares' milk and herbs. He went as
a military surgeon with the .Venetian fleet to the
distant shores of the Mediterranean. He journeyed
with a Tartar prince from Moscow to Constanti-
nople. He lived several months with a Turkish
magician. No country was too distant or dangerous
for the restless curiosity of Paracelsus.

All this time his reputation was growing. His
fame as a doctor traveled ahead of him. The sick
gathered around him, and he worked miraculous
cures, much to the annoyance of the local practition-
ers who generally made it so hot for him that he
could stay in a place no longer than a few weeks.
"I pleased no one," he said, "but the sick whom I
cured." The doctors spread lies about him, the
apothecaries refused to sell him supplies, and the
university authorities cross-questioned him for proof
that he practised black magic. Horrified physicians
read passages from Galen to show how the heretic
doctor diverged from established practice. Often
the opposition took violent forms. He fled from
Poland, from Lithuania, from Prussia, a mob of the
outraged orthodox at his heels.

About 1525, when Paracelsus was thirty-three

The Medical Luther 113

years old, he began to want to settle down, practice
medicine in peace, and digest what he'd learned on
his travels. So he looked around for a place which
might receive him, and chose Tubingen in Wiirttem-
berg, where he gathered pupils from among the
students at the university. Soon he was one of the
most popular teachers of medicine. His doctrines
began to gain ground, and he thought he'd found a
safe harbor at last.

But it was the same old story. He made no at-
tempts to conciliate the orthodox. He scoffed at their
antiquated methods, and healed the sick whom they'd
given up as hopeless. After two months he was
driven out with violence. He went to Freiburg. His
pupils followed, glowing with enthusiasm for the
new science he taught. Again he had to leave. He
went to Strassburg where a university was being
founded. No luck there either. Although he bought
a citizenship and became a member of the surgeons'
guild, he found the forces of orthodoxy arrayed
against him and had to fly before threats of arrest
and imprisonment.

Sitting gloomily beside the fire of a wayside tavern
a few days later, Paracelsus thought things over and
decided he'd have to change his tactics. All his life
he'd played a lone hand, asking no help and receiv-
ing none. And the forces of medical and scientific

114 Crusaders of Chemistry

orthodoxy were far too strong for one man to defy
safely. The doctrines of Galen and Avicenna were
as firmly established as the doctrines of the Church
herself, as immutable, as blasphemous to criticize.

"What the world needs," thought Paracelsus, "is
a medical Luther." Then quickly came the corollary
thought: "I am the man. I've learned from Nature
as Luther learned from the Bible. I've burned my
Galen as Luther burned the canon law. I've only to
post my ninety-five theses on the church door."

All during the lifetime of Paracelsus, the storm
of the Reformation had been gathering force. He'd
met with it here and there small battles between
Catholics and heretics, villages in flames, heaps of
white ashes in town squares. He'd remained neutral
as much as possible and carefully avoided centers
of conflict. But the confusion grew, and soon all Ger-
many was involved. The peasants of Swabia and
Franconia rose in a body, pulling down noble and
prelate alike, and chanting strange half-pagan rites
of their own invention. They were defeated and sav-
agely punished, but the conflict grew and spread.
Every town had its warring factions. Princes took
sides. Papal legates thundered from strongholds of
Catholicism. Bulls of excommunication flooded up
from below the Alps. But every day the revolt against
the old orthodoxy grew in power. Paracelsus con-

The Medical Luther 115

sidered carefully and threw in his lot with the
Lutherans.

In Switzerland the Reformation had taken strong
hold. Its leader Zwingli was second only to Luther
in power. His followers penetrated to every city and
canton, carrying with them new doctrines, new cere-
monies, new ideas. At Basel, just over the border
from Germany, the reformers had the upper hand,
controlling the municipal council which governed
this free city. So to Basel came the famous Erasmus
of Rotterdam, the great humanist whose writings
had done so much to prepare the ground for the
Reformation, to spend his old age with his friend
Johann Froben, publisher and bookseller, and hu-
manist almost as famous as himself. From Basel, one
of the few safe spots in Europe, Erasmus watched
sadly while the conflict started by his ideas grew into
a savage struggle which reduced to near-anarchy the
peaceful, tolerant Europe of his dreams.

For some time Johann Froben had been suffering
from a slight injury to his foot. It wasn't much to
start with and would probably have cured itself. But
the old-fashioned doctors of Basel insisted on such
harmful and violent treatment that they finally gave
up hope and ordered it amputated. Luckily Erasmus
arrived just in time, countermanded the order, and
sent for Paracelsus, whom he knew very well by

n6 Crusaders of Chemistry

reputation. The messenger found him sulking in a
small town outside Strassburg, and the magic name
of Erasmus brought him post-haste to Basel. The in-
jured foot responded at once to a sane and moderate
treatment, and Paracelsus followed up this .first
triumph by curing Erasmus himself of a number of
stubborn ailments which had bothered him for years.

After a few days in Basel Paracelsus looked about
him and decided that if he were ever to be the
medical Luther, this was the time and place to begin.
The town was favorable to change of all sorts. The
university had a constitution which forced it to yield
to some extent to popular opinion. And he had on his
side two of the most influential men in the city. He
took Erasmus and Froben into his confidence, won
them over to his great dream of a medical reforma-
tion, a union of medicine and alchemy. The three
put their heads together to see what could be done.

The office of city physician, which carried with it
a chair of medicine in the university, happened to
be vacant, and Erasmus and Froben were able to
persuade the city council that by appointing Para-
celsus they would get a very good doctor for the
placQ and at the same time would deal a telling blow
on the conservative professors of the university. The
Protestants on the council saw the point at once, and
suddenly Paracelsus found himself in power.

The Medical Luther 117

He drew a deep breath and plunged into the
battle. This was his great opportunity, and he wasn't
going to let it slip by any prudent consideration for
his colleagues 7 feelings. He resolved to dramatize
his new doctrines before the people themselves. Per-
haps if he won enough popular support, the doctors
themselves would come around to his side. So pres-
ently a notice in large letters appeared on the door
of the city hall: "The Famous Doctor Paracelsus,
City Physician, will speak at High Noon to-morrow
in the Town Square upon the New and Marvelous
Light of Medicine. He will also touch upon the
Ignorance, the Avarice, and the Strutting Vanity of
the Doctors of Basel."

The people of Basel loved scraps, and this looked
like a good one. The news spread rapidly, and long
before noon the town square was crowded. The
townspeople came in a mass ; the peasants moved in
from the countryside. Invalids and cripples dragged
themselves from their beds to stare at the platform
before the City Hall where a charcoal furnace
glowed brightly with two strong men working its
bellows. Exactly at noon Paracelsus appeared. He
was dressed in a sweeping black silk robe trimmed
with red. His hat was black and gold. He wore a
long sword and carried an ebony staff. Behind him

n8 Crusaders of Chemistry

walked a page carrying two large books bound in
leather.

For a moment he faced the crowd in silence, then
strutted up and down the platform, sweeping the
flagstones with his robe, showing off his staff, his
sword, and his regal stride. Then he stopped, tore
off his hat and threw it savagely into the audience,
slammed his sword on the pavement, broke his staff
over his knee, stripped off his robe, rolled it into a
crumpled ball and sent it after the hat. He advanced
toward the crowd bareheaded, in a plain gray jacket,
sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

"Thus," he screamed in his shrill voice. "Thus
should a doctor appear before his patient to cure
by knowledge, not by fine clothes, by science, not by
gold rings and jewels."

He motioned to the page who handed him one of
the books. With a furious gesture, Paracelsus tore
it in two and threw it on the furnace. It blazed up in
a burst of yellow flame and black smoke.

"That was Galen," he shouted.

The second book followed, and a second burst of
flame rose up.

"That was Avicenna," shrieked the heretic doctor.
"Old bloodless words. Vain mouthings of ignorance.
Latin sounds meaning nothing. From these books
your doctors get their Latin for diseases they know

AJLTfcJUVS NON SIT QVI 5VVS ES5F, PoTtST

PARACELSUS

Christened Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bomhastus

von Hohenheim, he applied chemistry to medicine and

was the first modern doctor.

The Medical Luther 119

nothing about and their Greek for diseases they never
heard of. Gray-bearded frauds, old wormy motheaten
sophists, lousy pretenders with their fine clothes, their
long steps, their Latin to hide their ignorance. They
cling to the rich like leeches and let the poor die like
flies. They make a disease out of nothing but a pain
in the belly from too much eating. And when there
is a real disease, they fly from it afraid for their
reputations. Their cures are worse than the illness.
They burn the flesh with hot irons, give black
draughts which tear at the bowels. Their plasters
raise blisters as thick as a hand. Then they go back
to their snug studies, thumb over Hippocrates, that
old Greek, and Galen, that old Roman, and count
the golden coins they've stolen from your pockets."
The crowd listened in silence, but its silence was
louder than cheers. The sick crowded the platform,
looking up with dim worshiping eyes while Para-
celsus told the story of his travels the marvelous
drugs he'd made by alchemy; the mercury which
cured French pox; zinc ointment which cured sore
skin; poppy juice from the East which veiled the
most savage pain in a thick mist of dreams. And
darker, less definite secrets the Archeus which lives
in the stomach and separates food from poison. Ele-
mental spirits, gnomes of the inner earth, salamanders
which live in the sphere of fire halfway to the sun.

I2O Crusaders of Chemistry

Incubi and Succubi, half-souls hatched out by
witches. Homunculi born of human seed in the
warmth of the alchemical crucible. Dark matters
these, far from the beaten track of medicine. But
the beaten track of medicine was a small barren
circle. Paracelsus had broken the restraining bonds
and flown off at a wavering tangent into outer space
where the secrets of life lay hidden still in dark-
ness. He brought back much which was weird and
foolish, much black magic which had haunted the
dusty corners of the human mind since the world
began. But he also discovered things of real value,
and best of all, he'd broken the bonds of Galenic
dogmatism.

When the flow of an oil well grows less and grad-
ually dies away, a silent slow-moving man drives
up in a rubber-padded truck with tanks of fretful
nitroglycerine sloshing under the seat. He has to be
a brave man, for he knows that if his load blows up,
there'll be no attempt at a funeral. He carefully fills
cylindrical cans with the uncertain stuff, lowers them
into the well, drops a sharp-pointed steel weight,
and steps back to feel the solid earth shake like jelly
under his feet. Perhaps the well is ruined for good,
the costly pipe shot up like water from a hose. But
perhaps the oil flows again. At any rate, without this
drastic step the well would be useless and barren.

The Medical Luther 12?;

Paracelsus was the well shooter of Sixteenth Cen-
tury medical chemistry. He was far from slow-mov-
ing and silent. His words were his nitroglycerine.
With shattering phrases, weird theories, untried
cures, he smashed forever the barren system of Galen-
ism. Medicine and chemistry sprouted like mush-
rooms after rain. Much of the growth was poisonous
and unhealthy. But there was growth, and before
there'd been nothing but words, dry dust, and decay.

The doctrines of Paracelsus started the bitterest
controversy medicine had ever seen. Chemical
medicine it was now, iatrochemistry, for Paracelsus
had wedded the two sciences, and for a hundred
years they went hand in hand. From its starting point
in Basel, the conflict went all over Europe, running
parallel with the religious fury of the Reformation.
Universities were divided; old-fashioned doctors
banded together for defense, fighting by boycott,
libel, trials for black magic, even assassination. The
spirit of the age was not calm and judicious. In
medicine, as in religion, the old doctrines fought back
savagely with any weapon which came to hand.
Paracelsus soon felt the penalty for starting such an
uproar.

For a year or two he had the upper hand in Basel.
Behind him were Erasmus and Froben, the reform-
ing clergy, and the rich townsmen he'd cured. But,

122 Crusaders of Chemistry

tactless as always, he made more enemies than
friends. The physicians, of course, were solidly and
passionately against him. The apothecaries joined
in the battle, enraged at the regulations which
Paracelsus instituted to test the purity of their drugs
and resenting the new doctrines which substituted
cheap chemical remedies for the costly infusions of
rare herbs brought from the East. These two groups
would have been able to do little alone, but they set
out to enlist allies. Paracelsus gave them plenty of
talking points. Trade after trade he antagonized.
He denounced the tactics of the lawyers. He'd go
into a goldsmith's shop and tell at a glance which
metals were adulterated. He detected commercial
trickery of all sorts ; he knew the tricks as well as the
shopkeepers did. In the language of modern business,
he "impaired confidence/' and soon every guild in the
city was bombarding the municipal council with
petitions to get rid of this terrible doctor who was
wrecking the fabric of secret agreement and mildly
fraudulent compromise so essential to the com-
mercial status quo. The council looked around for a
pretext. It wasn't long before it found one.

A certain canon of the cathedral, wealthy and a
solid rock of orthodoxy, fell sick of an unknown ill-
ness. He tried all the regular doctors without im-
provement, drank endless nasty syrups, took

The Medical Luther 123

numerous medicated baths, and got sicker and sicker
all the time. But he wouldn't call on Paracelsus,
even though his friends urged him to. Better call the
devil himself than one of his human playmates. But
one day he saw death looking in at the window. He
screamed for his attendants even a canon feels a
bit nervous about death and told them to offer
Paracelsus a hundred gulden for a cure. The heretic
doctor arrived at once and set to work with his
simple remedies. Perhaps he was helped by the
patient's firm belief in his diabolical inspiration, but
at any rate in three days the canon was well on the
road to recovery. Paracelsus asked for his hundred
gulden.

The canon looked up from his pillow, weak but
quite returned to his senses. A hundred gulden for
this henchman of Luther, this black magician! A
hundred gulden of the money of Holy Church! A
hundred gulden indeed! "Here's six," he said. "I
know what my life's worth better than you do."

Paracelsus raged and swore; reached down deep
into his ample stock of bad language ; demanded his
just and agreed payment. He'd cure the poor for
nothing, but this fat parasite, this round-bellied Rom-
ish bloodsucker, would have to pay the full amount.
Hadn't he saved his worse than useless life? Hadn't
he given him a few additional years in which to

124 Crusaders of Chemistry

trick the simple-minded of Basel? He'd go to law
about it if it was the last thing he did in this world.

The canon smiled contentedly. He knew more
about the law than Paracelsus did, and perhaps he
knew the insecurity of the doctor's political stand-
ing. The case was taken to court and decided against
Paracelsus. The municipal council saw a chance to
unite the forces of orthodoxy and aggrieved com-
mercialism against its troublesome doctor. It went
so far as to rebuke Paracelsus for asking such a fee
for a few visits and a little cheap medicine.

Paracelsus probably didn't care about the fee ; he
had plenty of money at this period. But the rebuke
made him fighting mad even madder than usual,
which was saying a good deal. And he lost the last
remnants of his tact, which was also saying a good
deal. He wrote a pamphlet in his best style against
the judges, denouncing them for deciding from the
depths of their ignorance a matter about which they
did and could know nothing whatever. The pamphlet
was scattered about the streets, and the town was in
an uproar.

It seems incredible that a matter as remote from
public interest as the theory of medical practice
should be the cause of a popular controversy, but at
the time of the Reformation, religion and medicine
were largely identified in the popular mind. Each

The Medical Luther 125

had its orthodoxy and each its heresies. Paracelsus
was a partisan of Luther. In attacking Galenism he
was also attacking the doctrines of Holy Church. If
he'd been a more tactful politician, he could at least
have relied on the support of the Lutheran party,
but he attacked the small tradesmen who formed the
backbone of the Reformation as fiercely as he did the
Church herself, applying as violent language to
fraudulent apothecaries as to the ignorant Galenic
physicians. He failed to learn the first lesson of the
successful reformer to appeal to the prejudices of
the party you consider least harmful.

Before the pamphlet had been on the streets an
hour, Paracelsus realized he'd gone too far. Erasmus
and Froben couldn't protect him now. The judges
and city council were furious. The doctors and
apothecaries clamored louder than ever. The Church
and the university were hot on the trail. A warrant
was issued for his arrest and exile on an island in
Lake Lucerne. He was warned just in time and fled
over the border into comparatively friendly Ger-
many.

The rest of his life Paracelsus spent on the road,
curing a prince here, a peasant there; sometimes
alone, sometimes followed by a group of enthusiastic
disciples, but always observing, learning, raging
against the doctors, the Church, and the established

126 Crusaders of Chemistry

order in general. He died at Salzburg in 1541, a
homeless wanderer, almost an outcast, but he died
with the satisfaction of knowing he'd dealt the
doctrines of Galen a blow from which they'd never
recover.

The conflict he started continued after his death
and grew into an intellectual battle involving every-
one in Europe with the faintest interest in science
or medicine. There were Paracelsans and anti-
Paracelsans. He was denounced as a quack and glori-
fied as a divine healer, the German Hippocrates.
His followers carried his theories to dangerous ex-
tremes, dosing their patients with violent drugs such
as sulphuric acid and bichloride of mercury and
killing them off even faster than the Galenists did.
The mystical side of his teaching inspired another
group which saw in him a prophet of the dim gods
and demons of the ages before human memory. The
Oriental words with which he was fond of clothing
his mystical theories became a secret language, and
the name Paracelsus gained a place in magical in-
cantations which it retains to the present day.

For several reasons it's hard to put a definite valu-
ation on the chemical and medical discoveries of
Paracelsus. Doctors and scientists of the Sixteenth
Century didn't like to publish their discoveries, and
when they did publish, they were apt to speak in a

The Medical Luther 127

mystical language designed to carry meaning only
to the initiated. This wasn't only because they wanted
to keep the benefits to themselves. They had a real
conviction that knowledge of Nature was a weapon
too powerful for the unenlightened to possess. Para-
celsus was almost the worst offender in this respect.
It was commonly believed at the time of his death
that his most important secrets had never been made
public. The accounts of some of his famous cures
seem to indicate that he knew more than he pre-
tended to. And what he did put down in black and
white is written in such difficult language that it's
hard to follow the meaning.

Another confusing factor was the prevalence of
literary forgery. Since an old book was considered
more authoritative than a new one, the writers on
alchemy were apt to date their works back a few
hundred years and sign them with the name of some
illustrious character of the past. The reputation of
Paracelsus suffered from this in two ways. Various
later forgeries were attributed to him, hurting his
reputation when discovered. And a good part of his
genuine discoveries were copied down after his death
and attributed to a non-existent monk named Basil
Valentine who was supposed to have lived much
earlier. This made him look like the worst sort of a

128 Crusaders of Chemistry

plagiarist, and only in recent times was he completely
cleared of this charge.

His general theory of chemistry, on which he based
his operations, sounds extremely fantastic to us. It
contains a great deal of mystical trash which has
no place in science. It confused the situation by add-
ing three "principles," salt, sulphur, and mercury,
to the four "elements" of Aristotle. In general, it
was little improvement on the numerous theories
which preceded it. But on certain specific points
Paracelsus made definite advances. He believed in
the possibility of transmuting metals, but didn't think
it could be done with the existing facilities. This is
just what modern science thinks about it. He made
several valuable distinctions which stood for a long
time divided salts into "alums" and "vitriols," for
instance, according to whether they had a metal or an
"earth" for a base. Not until Sir Humphry Davy
discovered that the earths were metallic oxides did
this distinction fall.

He was the first to use the word "zinc" and the
first to describe the preparation of the metal. In
medicine he introduced a long list of drugs which
may have been in use before by unorthodox physi-
cians but which had never entered the practice of the
profession in general. Most of them were chemical
in origin. He used mercury compounds for syphilis,

The Medical Luther 129

zinc ointment for skin diseases, and many other
metallic preparations, a large number of which are
still in use to-day.

But it isn't on his definite scientific discoveries
that his fame depends. Paracelsus was a reformer,
almost a prophet, and seldom do either reformers or
prophets contribute anything definite to the knowl-
edge of their day. They are leaders, rallying points.
They see broad principles and fight to open the way
for more productive but less courageous minds.
Luther was the most conspicuous public character
of the Sixteenth Century. His influence on the period
was greater than that of any other man. But he was
a poor theologian and a worthless philosopher. His
importance came from the vigor with which he acted
on his strong conviction that the Church needed
housecleaning.

Paracelsus was the Luther of science. He was the
reformer who blasted science out of its habit of look-
ing back to the superior knowledge of the past. He
believed, as we do now, that knowledge comes from
accurate and unprejudiced observation, not from
doctrine. Like Luther, he had to contend with the
universal medieval conviction that the huowm ^flj
has little to look for in the future and had better-
study with reverence the all-wise revelations of the
past. It wasn't only the Church

130 Crusaders of Chemistry

Science and medicine thought the same way; be-
lieved that if you searched through the dim pages of
antiquity you'd learn more than if you observed the
pages of Nature which lie open before your eyes.

But after Paracelsus all this changed. The closed
circles of alchemy and Galenism, like the closed
circle of Catholic doctrine, burst in fragments and
out poured an avalanche of new ideas, some of them
weird and eccentric but others sufficiently sane to
form the firm basis of modern medicine and chem-
istry. No longer did the alchemists give their whole
attention to the pathetic search for the Stone. They
had a better object now, to prepare medicines and pry
into the chemistry of the human body. No longer did
the doctors weigh one false assumption of antiquity
against another equally false. They could draw on
the vast accumulation of useful knowledge which
the furtive alchemists had been building up for
centuries.

So when we put iodine on an infected finger or
watch some friend being brought back into the world
by insulin or diphtheria anti-toxin, let's thank Para-
celsus for giving the first rude push which started
medicine on the task it has done so well. He hadn't
the logic of Roger Bacon, or Bacon's level sanity, but
he started the invaluable revolution which Bacon
had failed to start two and a half centuries before.

The First Bishop of Science

CHAPTER V
The First Bishop of Science

THE world does its thinking in spurts, with
much noise and excitement then rests for a
century or two happily confident that it has found
at last a firm philosophy of life. These "thinking
periods" are painful to live in. The old order fades
away into the past, and it looks very attractive as
it dissolves in memory. The new order comes on with
alarming quickness. It is hard, shining, harsh like
a new and unfamiliar machine. It has gathered no
sentiments, no warm traditions, and men look at it
with fear, wondering how their spirits will avoid its
sharp edges, how they can be happy without the
comfortable old ways of life which this nascent
monster will destroy so cruelly.

Such a period was the Seventeenth Century. Noth-
ing stood firm. The Papacy was shaken to its founda-
tions; Protestant sects sprang up like mushrooms,
and religious warfare was the order of the day. The
Divine Right of Kings was shaken too. Not so pro-
foundly, but shaken nevertheless. And most im-

133

134 Crusaders of Chemistry

portant of all in the Seventeenth Century were
celebrated the first triumphs of the Scientific
Method, that calm, skeptical habit of thought which
has grown gradually until it now dominates com-
pletely, for better or worse, the mind of civilization.

With a favorable breeze pushing it gayly into the
harbor, a trim little ship approached the wharfs of
Plymouth. The sailors ran about madly; sharp words
of command crackled from the quarterdeck; sails
flapped; men shouted. It looked like confusion un-
directed, but the serious, sad-looking young man who
stood amidships knew better. He knew each move-
ment was planned, each shout meant something
essential; that officers and men alike had one object
alone to dock the ship safely. "How fine," he re-
flected, "to know what you're doing and have no
thought beyond your task. It takes skill and judgment
to manage a ship but how directly, how simply the
problems are solved. How I envy these men! How I
wish I were one of them! They see their problems
so clearly. But they are sailors and I am Robert
Boyle, son of the great Earl of Cork. And all Eng-
land is lost in the tumult of civil war.*'

It was the year 1644, an ^ the Puritans and Royal-
ists were at one another's throats. The Cavaliers were

The First Bishop of Science 135

riding the moors, and with them two of Robert
Boyle's older brothers. The Roundheads held the
towns of the south, the heart of England, and the
battle of Marston Moor had just given them the ad-
vantage in the north. But nothing was settled. Arm-
ies marched this way and that across the country.
Families were divided. Town fought against town,
and village against village. The Irish were up in
revolt. The Scotch flooded down from the north,
not quite sure what they wanted but anxious to get
into the fight. It was a tough country to return to
after six peaceful years on the continent, and as he
came ashore at Plymouth, Robert Boyle felt very
much adrift and alone. He had no plans, no hope,
no moorings. He'd lived for six years, from his
thirteenth to nineteenth birthday, in the quiet places
of Europe, studying under the care of a tutor, lav-
ishly supplied with money from the rich resources
of the earl, his father. But now that father was dead.
England rang with war. His whole world had fallen,
and the darkness was filled with cries and the sound
of cannon.

And, worst of all, Robert Boyle didn't know which
side he was on. He was pulled back and forth by
conflicting loyalties. Brought up, as customary with
boys of his high birth, to worship and trust in the
Church, the King, Morality, Faith, all the interlock-

136 Crusaders of Chemistry

ing traditions which buttress the status quo, he was
drawn by the forces of early training and heritage
toward the Royalists who were defending these
traditions against change and destruction. But on the
other hand, his brain told him that tradition was
seldom the best guide. His six-year residence at
Geneva and other Protestant centers had made him
sympathetic with the Puritan leaders who wanted a
new deal in religion and politics. And he knew that
a new deal would have to come.

Thus, at the age of nineteen, Robert Boyle came
face to face with the problem which troubled him all
his life. Whether to follow his heart and the
Cavaliers or his head and the Puritans. Deep within
his being he longed for the calm, the tranquillity,
the unquestioning faith of the past. But his brain was
too alert, too inquisitive, too original. It told him
that the past was gone forever; that religion had
broken from its safe moorings; that from now on
men would trust less in faith, and more in reason.
The world was changing rapidly. Boyle's heart was
sorry to see it change. But his head after all was
stronger, and it made him a somewhat unwilling
leader of the modern, the scientific age.

Robert Boyle was born in 1626. He was the seventh
son of the Earl of Cork, the leading peer of Ireland,
and one of the richest Englishmen alive. He was a

The First Bishop of Science 137

sickly child, and he stammered terribly. When he
was sent to Eton at the age of nine, his weakness, his
stammer, his private tutor and private meals intensi-
fied his natural shyness and made him into a timid
boy much more fond of his studies than of the famous
"playing fields" which two hundred years later were
to be thanked for winning the Battle of Waterloo.
During his three years at Eton his health grew rather
worse than better, and so in 1638 he was sent to travel
on the continent with his seventeen-year-old brother
Francis and a French tutor M. Marcombes.

It was a common thing to send young noblemen to
the courts of the continent for a general polish and
broadening, but this time the motives of the old earl
were very different. He'd seen too many of his
numerous sons grow up to "drinking, dicing, and
wenching" at the merry court of England. He vowed
his two youngest should be educated in a very dif-
ferent atmosphere. So Geneva it was instead of
Paris, Vienna, or Madrid. Dour Geneva, lair of
shadows, stronghold of grumbling Calvinism, "where
they would be in no danger from conversations with
Jesuits, friars, priests, or any other persons ill-af-
fected toward their religion, king or state." Poor old
earl! He saw the changes coming over the horizon
which would upset the loyalties he had served so long

138 Crusaders of Chemistry

and so faithfully. He thought that at Geneva at least
there was peace and security. He made the all-too-
common mistake of confusing social dullness with
stability. Geneva was certainly dull to courtiers' eyes,
but it was also staunchly Puritan, and Seventeenth
Century Puritanism was a quarreling, questioning
faith which attacked every established doctrine from
the sanctity of marriage to the Divine Right of Kings.
A poor place to send a young boy if you wanted him
to keep his mind placidly in tune with the past.

It was a gay England the two boys left behind
them, an England enjoying perhaps consciously the
last few pleasant years before the oncoming storm
broke over its head. The court was brilliant, and
the old earl and his numerous sons and daughters
were in the very midst of it all. He was very close to
the king himself, and when Roger Boyle, Baron of
Broghill, married charming Margaret Howard, ele-
gant King Charles himself forgot his political
troubles for the time and presided with gayety and
good humor. There were plays and music and danc-
ing. And Sir John Suckling wrote a poem in honor
of the bride which contains three lines which will
live forever:

"Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out
As if they feared the light"

The First Bishop of Science 139

It was a gay England. And it would be pleasant
to think that Robert Boyle regretted leaving it. But
he probably did not. He was being sent to Geneva
for moral buttressing, but never did boy need it less.
He had enough morality already to keep him both-
ered the rest of his life. His letters home sound like
those of a somewhat unworldly bishop. What would
such a boy be doing at the merry court of the Stuarts?

Geneva was a curious city in those days although
perhaps no more curious than it is to-day with the
League of Nations cluttering its streets with the
cranky idealists of all the world. It made a great
show of toleration, which meant, since the Protes-
tants of various shades were the only people in need
of toleration, that every sect, from dictatorial Cal-
vinism, already something of an established church,
to wild and furious Anabaptism, was represented in
this city of dreadful preaching. Religion was almost
the only topic of conversation ; it was talked on street
corners, in shops, and in parlors. Every other man
was bent on converting his neighbor to his own
particular view. Sunday slopped over into the week,
and at every hour of every day some earnest minister
could be heard haranguing his flock. Geneva was a
religious clearing house. Religion was the main-
spring of its life.

Of course this affected Robert Boyle. It couldn't

140 Crusaders of Chemistry

help doing so. He was not strong physically, and
weaklings are singularly prone to religious introspec-
tion. His tutor, M. Marcombes, seems to have been
some sort of Huguenot. He favored perhaps, cer-
tainly didn't oppose, Robert's Puritan leanings. He
wasn't alarmed when a sudden thunderstorm threw
him into a fever of apprehension lest he be caught
unprepared for the Judgment Day. Well-brought-up
children in those days were expected to dwell much
on their chances of bliss or hell fire.

When, after eighteen months in Geneva, the party
moved on to Italy, Robert's mind was already set in
a Puritan mold and proof against the theological
blandishments of Rome and the well-advertised
fleshly temptations of Italy. His account of that
fascinating country is written in such a serious vein
that the reader must constantly remind himself that
this was a boy of fifteen, not a graybeard of sixty
who looked on the amusements of the Italians with
such disapproving eyes and found on every street
corner still another proof that the Pope was no fit
leader for genuine Christianity.

The old Earl of Cork may have worried a bit
over his sons in wicked Italy, but needn't have. Not
about Robert at least, for the young Puritan had al-
ready developed the typically Puritan habit of get-
ting more intense pleasure out of resisting temptation

The First Bishop of Science 141

than of yielding to it. How the earl's elderly virtue
must have rejoiced at this letter from his son in
Florence :

"When Carnival was come (the season when
madness is so general in Italy that Lunacy does
for that time lose its name) he [Robert] had the
pleasure to see the tilts maintained by the Grand
Duke's brothers and be present at the gentle-
men's balls. Nor did he sometimes scruple, in
his Governor's company, to visit the famousest
Bordellos, whither resorting out of bare curi-
osity he retained there an unblemished chastity
and still returned thence as honest as he went
thither, professing that he could never have
found any such sermons against them as they
were against themselves: the impudent naked-
ness of vice clothing it with a deformity descrip-
tion cannot reach and the worst of epithets can-
not flatter."

No, there was no danger of Robert's falling into
the ways of certain of his older brothers.

The Boyles and their tutor made a short visit to
Rome and then returned to Geneva. It was now the
spring of 1642 and alarming news began to arrive
from England. King and Parliament were laying
aside all pretense and preparing for civil war. The
Irish had risen, as they always did when the English
were busy elsewhere, and the old earl had hastened

142 Crusaders of Chemistry

off to protect his estates from the "mere Irish" on
one side and the Catholic Lords of the Pale, a no
better than Irish," on the other. Naturally the supply
of money failed. Some was sent, but it never arrived.
There was nothing to do but stay in Geneva, where
M. Marcombes had his home, live as cheaply as
possible, and pray that England would calm down,
or that the right side would win.

The right side? Robert Boyle began to wonder
which was the right side. He was only seventeen but
already he began to suffer from that conflict of heart
and head which bothered him all his life. By birth
and training he was a Royalist son of an earl whose
long, active, and successful life had been spent serv-
ing the crown, whether in the person of Elizabeth,
James, or Charles. He had been brought up an
Anglican, been trained to feel that the perfect
philosophy of life was the ancient theology of the
Christian Church, purged happily of such evil
growths as the Papacy and the Mass. And in matters
of government he had been brought up to worship
that marvelous structure of tradition, non-logic, and
compromise which had hitherto kept the English
state on a more-or-less even keel.

But Geneva this was no place to go if you wished
your mind to crystallize in the ancient forms. Geneva
was a fermenting vat of repellent but vigorous

The First Bishop of Science 143

thought. Here was Puritanism in its thousand forms,
feeling its strength and preparing to sound its dis-
cordant bugle call and announce the birth of a new
age.

In Twentieth Century America, Puritanism is the
dead hand of a very unpleasant past. There is no
joy in it, no light, no progress or hope of progress.
It lives in moldy laws and unreasoning, unfeeling
conventions. But in the Seventeenth Century this was
not so. The Puritans were the innovators. They stood
for liberty of thought, for freedom of personal belief,
for the right of individual judgment. Against them
were arrayed all the forces which the modern
Puritans cherish as allies the established order, the
king, the courts, rural ignorance, and social con-
servatism. To be a Puritan was to combat all these
reactionary forces. To champion the individual
against Church and State. To pit the liberalism of the
city against the incurable mental stagnation of the
countryside. To fight for self-government against the
Divine Right of Kings. Puritanism shortly became
more illiberal than ever its opponents had been, but
that's the way with all successful heresies. Its spirit
at the beginning was that of violent revolt against
the past.

This questioning spirit Robert Boyle absorbed at
Geneva, and it counteracted the traditional loyal-

144 Crusaders of Chemistry

ties which otherwise would have made him a natural
Royalist and supporter of the king. But neither
tendency won a final victory. All through his life
his active skeptical mind forced him to find new
truths, map out unknown intellectual country, while
his conservative spirit mourned inconsolably over
the precious traditions which these discoveries
destroyed.

In 1644 Robert Boyle sold some jewels and man-
aged to reach England. The Civil War was at its
height, and he was confronted by a dilemma. His
deepest unreasoning feelings drew him toward the
king. And his mind, churning with new ideas from
Geneva, drew him toward the Parliament. It is hard
for a modern American to imagine a man drawn to
the Puritans by reason and drawn away by loyalty to
tradition. Nowadays the positions are always re-
versed. But such was the situation with Robert Boyle.
The Puritan party was new, innovating, experi-
mental ; it was progressive in abstract thought as well
as in politics and religion. Such a party appealed
to the mind of this serious, pale youth with his in-
quiring mind and his background of Genevan
theology. But his deeper feelings, the feelings that
do not need words or logic to express their decrees,
told him that to join the Parliament would be
treason to his class, his ancestry. Was he not the son

The First Bishop of Science 145

of the Earl of Cork, the Elizabethan nobleman
who'd labored to build up the power of the Crown
in savage Ireland? Were not his brothers fighting
with the Cavaliers? Had not King Charles himself,
elegant and gracious, officiated at his family's
numerous weddings? If he joined the Parliamentar-
ians without in some way quieting this unreasonable
conscience of his, he looked forward to numerous
guilty regrets.

Luckily he didn't have to decide for himself.
After all, he was only nineteen and too weak
physically to be of much use to either army. So as
soon as he entered London his favorite sister, Lady
Ranelagh, a staunch but moderate Puritan, gathered
him into her Parliamentary circle and insulated him
carefully against any overtures from the other side.
Robert was surprised to learn that the Cavaliers
were not noble and patriotic gentlemen but a pack
of thievish looters with no morals or principles. The
king was no longer the just and kind monarch he
used to be but an unreasoning tyrant who employed
most evil advisors. The elder Boyle brothers were
fighting for the king with marked lack of enthusiasm,
and the most important of them, Broghill, was
actually on the Parliamentary side, although he had
made Cromwell promise that he would send him

146 Crusaders of Chemistry

only to Ireland to replace the earl his father who had
just died.

Robert took a general view of this information in
search of something*to exhibit to his intractable con-
science. He found what he was looking for. "Ah,"
said this good young man (it must be admitted that
Robert was loathsomely and revoltingly good)
"Ah, here it is." And he wrote down in his diary
"that there were in the Royalist Army beside the ex-
cellent king himself diverse eminent divines and
many worthy persons of several ranks ; yet the gen-
erality of those he would have been obliged to con-
verse with were very debauched and apt, as well as
inclined, to make others so." And he thanked his
lucky stars that he was living in the religious and
virtuous household of his sister instead of riding the
countryside with the dangerously unvirtuous Cav-
aliers.

Whatever might have been the moral advantages
gained by living with Lady Ranelagh, there was a
practical advantage also. The fortunes of the king
were waning. Most of the country was in the hands
of the Parliament, including Dorsetshire which con-
tained Robert Boyle's manor of Stalbridge where he
proposed to live until the war was over. Through
her acquaintance with high Parliamentary leaders
Lady Ranelagh managed to get her brother a safe

The First Bishop of Science 147

conduct through the Parliamentary lines and a
bodyguard of soldiers to take him to his own door.

Stalbridge is a small place in a remote part of
Dorsetshire far from any good-sized town. Stalbridge
Manor was an ideal hideout for anyone who didn't
intend to take an active part in the somewhat hectic
political and religious doings of the times. Many
sensible Englishmen were thus in retirement, won-
dering at the spirit of extremism which had taken
possession of their country and carefully refraining
from committing themselves to either side. Robert
Boyle was one of these. He considered warfare a poor
way to settle a controversy, and he knew very well
that, favorably situated as he was with powerful
friends in both camps, an attitude of neutrality
would be the safest in the end.

When Boyle took possession of Stalbridge Manor
he was only nineteen years old, but never did a more
serious young person look with supercilious dis-
approval at the habits of humanity or seek to draw
morals from everyday events. This was the period in
which he composed his "Occasional Reflections,"
little essays of such intense moral smugness that few
modern readers can glance at them without anguish.
Such syrupy goodness, such self-confident superiority
to human weaknesses I The titles of these little ser-
mons, which outline the text after the fashion of the

148 Crusaders of Chemistry

day, show enough of the spirit to spare us the neces-
sity of reading the rest.

We can see the young philosopher, grave and
handsome in a pale way, walking about his pleasant
estate and observing with a critical moral eye the life
of the quiet countryside. It is early morning and some
feathery pinkish clouds hang in the sky. Boyle looks
at them with pleasure as who would not? but they
set the moral mechanism in his mind to grinding out
a little sermon. He takes pen and paper and writes
a "reflection," calling it:

"Upon the sight of some variously colored
clouds. Gaudy and glittering favorites are vain
and short-lived shadows, often destroyed by the
very hand that raised and decked them out for
the public eye to gaze at and admire."

No wonder when he looked up again the clouds
had faded.

A little farther on he hears a lark and sees the
bird disappearing into the sky, leaving behind him a
thin trail of music. Boyle watches, sensing that a
moral is about to suggest itself. And so it does. The
lark comes back to earth, lights on a clod, and blends
so perfectly with its surroundings that until it moves
to pick up a worm, it is almost invisible. Boyle takes
his pen and writes another "reflection," pointing out

The First Bishop of Science 149

that the lark, although it sings as if it were really
part of the brilliant sky above, can nevertheless de-
scend to earth in search of a vulgar worm and be-
come once more a part of the earth's mean surface.

"Upon the mounting, singing, and lighting of
larks, Hypocrisy is odious; but that circum-
stance does not excuse the open libertine; it is
the pretense of religion and virtue we despise,
and the best way of avoiding such pretense is
really to practice them."

That lark probably moved off Boyle's prop-
erty the very next day.

But the occupation which was most productive of
"reflections" was angling. Boyle, like most English
country gentlemen, was devoted to this placid sport,
not only because it made few demands on his small
stock of strength, but because it gave him a chance
to meditate. He writes much of "Angling improved
to spiritual uses." Here are a few of his titles:

"Upon the being called upon to rise early on
a very fair morning. We should not be dis-
couraged from endeavoring to reform others by
their unwillingness to listen to us, or even by the
dislike they may at first conceive against us."

"Upon fishing with a counterfeit fly, Men
are often tempted to do wrong even by a mere
show of advantage."

150 Crusaders of Chemistry

"Upon a fish's struggling after having swal-
lowed the hook. Ill-gotten advantages always
bear their sting along with them."

"Upon a fall occasioned by coming too near
the river's brink. It is dangerous to go too near
the very verge of what is lawful."

It was probably fortunate for Boyle that angling
is a solitary sport. Even in that day of preaching and
moralizing, he'd probably have found few real
anglers who liked to go fishing with a man in such
a state of mind.

These "Occasional Reflections" were not written
for publication, but they were published nevertheless
and gained a certain amount of popularity among
the moral-minded. So much so that the terrible Dean
Swift saw fit to satirize Boyle's pompous style and
sickish moralizing in his well-known "Essay on a
Broomstick, after the manner of the late Robert
Boyle." Needless to say, the "Essay on a Broom-
stick," although becoming a bit dim itself, will live
long after any of its models.

It is hard while reading these "reflections" to be-
lieve that they were from the pen of a man who was
to become a great scientist. They are written skill-
fully in what was then a much admired style, but
beyond this they have no merit Most clergymen can

The First Bishop of Science 151

do as well and many much better. They contain no
idea, no illustration which wasn't old a thousand
years before Boyle went to live at Stalbridge. But
even if they have no merit of their own, they show
some very important things about Boyle's character.

Robert Boyle was never in very good health, and
his incurable stammer together with his constant ill-
nesses kept him from most companionship. Deprived
of their natural outlet in sport and the innocent or
not so innocent diversions of normal young men, his
powerful mind and ambitious spirit turned to other
fields. The less normal a man is the more he looks
for ways to distinguish himself, for he feels that un-
less he definitely excels in some respect, he will fall
below the general level of his normal companions.

To a young man suffering from physical handi-
caps there are two roads open to the pleasant country
of self-esteem superior righteousness and superior
mental accomplishments. Both roads are well
traveled, and the types on each are familiar. Toward
righteousness travel the gentle saints who inspire by
courageous suffering, the homely, angular old maids,
cheated by life, the half-lunatic Carrie Nations, and
the fanatical reformers whose single desire is to
make others lead the dull unhuman existence forced
on them by some mental or physical disability. To-
ward intellectual eminence travel the physically han-

152 Crusaders of Chemistry

dicapped whose whole energies have been diverted
into their brains. The eunuch Paracelsus, the blind
Milton, the epileptic Dostoevsky, and the hunchback
Steinmetz. It could probably be proved that much
of the good as well as most of the harm has been
done to the world by men whose mental or physical
disabilities have made them feel that if they do not
impress their personalities strongly on society they
will be classed for good with the social waifs and
strays.

Boyle is remarkable among this varied company in
that he took the first road, decided it led to no good
destination, and turned back to take the second. To
judge by the "Occasional Reflections," he was, in his
early twenties, well on the way to becoming an in-
tolerable preacher and moral faultfinder with an in-
sufferable sense of his own virtue and a fanatical
hatred for the pleasant mild vices of life which his
health made it impossible for him to enjoy. But he
never went beyond this point. He never developed
from the preacher into the persecutor; never made
any great effort to force others into his way of life.
He remained virtuous enough ; it isn't difficult for a
semi-invalid. But his righteousness became less and
less annoying until at the end of his life he was a
tolerant, slightly amused spectator at the pleasantly
dissolute court of the Restoration. What brought

The First Bishop of Science 153

about the change was this: He found an interest
worthy of his powerful mind. Shortly after writing
the "Reflections" he became absorbed in "natural
philosophy," meaning physics and chemistry. And
moral fanaticism can't live, much less grow, in the
logical atmosphere of a laboratory.

Let's examine now his two great discoveries. We'll
find a very different quality of mind from that shown
in the distressing "Occasional Reflections."

By 1654 the Civil War had quieted down, Crom-
well was sitting crownless on the throne, and Boyle
had moved to Oxford in search of "philosophical
companionship." He had been working since 1647
on various scientific problems but hadn't accom-
plished much. The times were too confused, supplies
were hard to get, and money was scarce. But now the
situation was better, and he began to make progress.
The first thing he tackled successfully was the prob-
lem of the vacuum.

The fact that water, for no apparent reason, fol-
lows upward the piston of a pump had long bothered
the "natural philosophers," and since they had no
better way of explaining it, they developed the theory
that "Nature abhors a vacuum," and consequently
draws up the water to fill the space below the piston.

It was solemnly stated with great metaphysical
subtlety that Nature, that vague abstraction so often

154 Crusaders of Chemistry

confused with God, was determined that no space
should exist unfilled with some kind of matter. Of
course, to the scientific mind, this is no explanation
at all. Nature isn't supposed to have emotions. But
in the Seventeenth Century, the scientific mind was
only half developed. The reasoning of the time was
strongly tinged with theology, and it seemed per-
fectly all right to allow Nature to have at least a
few of the irrational prejudices which the various
deities have enjoyed since the world began.

Of course most of the thinkers of the time realized
that the "abhorrence" theory was inadequate, but be-
cause they were half theologians, they tried to im-
prove it instead of throwing it overboard entirely.
Theological minds always try to defend against all
odds the errors of the past. Descartes, the great
French philosopher and mathematician, wandered
off into metaphysics, maintaining that if a space ex-
isted with nothing whatever in it, the walls of that
space would be separated by nothing, and therefore
could be said to touch. And where is the vacuum?
Hobbes, slightly more practical-minded, declared
that the universe was entirely full, and illustrated
his theory as follows :

"If a gardener's watering-pot be filled with
water, the hole at the top being stopped, the
water will not flow out of any of the holes in

The First Bishop of Science 155

the bottom; but if the finger be removed to let
in the air above, it will run out of them all, and
as soon as the finger be applied to it again, the
water will suddenly and totally be stayed again
from running out. The cause whereof seems to
be no other but this, that the water cannot, by
its natural endeavor to descend, drive down the
air below it because there is no place for the
air to go unless by thrusting away the next
contiguous air it proceed by continual endeavor
to the hole at the top, where it may enter and
succeed in the place of the water that floweth
out, or else by resisting the endeavor of the water
downwards penetrate the same and pass up
through it."

Boyle took a IOOK at the various theories and de-
cided something was wrong. He very sensibly dis-
missed the Descartes theory as a matter of words, not
of facts, and set to work on Hobbes, whose theory
had gained so many followers that they had a name,
the plenists.

There were many things wrong with the plenist
theory. It explained such things as the action of
watering pots and such, but very little else. If, for
instance, the watering pot were made in the form
of a pipe thirty-five feet long, the water would not
wait until a hole was opened at the top, but would
flow out at once until its level stood between thirty-

156 Crusaders of Chemistry

two and thirty-three feet above the bottom. Where
had the air gone which this water replaced? Fur-
thermore, if the same pipe were taken to the top of
a high mountain, more of the water would flow out
than at sea level. Why did Nature abhor a vacuum
less at the top of a mountain than at the bottom?
And if mercury were substituted for the water it
never rose higher than some thirty inches. It looked
as if mercury had more influence with Nature than
water had.

Now before you can study a vacuum you have to
capture one and domesticate it. Up to the time Boyle
took charge of the problem this had not been done.
The Torricellian vacuum at the top of a column of
mercury is a very good vacuum indeed, but it's hard
to manage and practically useless for experiment be-
cause there's no way of getting at it. In 1654 Consul
Guericke of Magdeburg demonstrated the first air
pump, a simple machine much like an ordinary
bicycle pump but working in reverse so as to take air
from a vessel instead of forcing more in. It had one
disadvantage. It was so faulty in operation that it
had to be worked under water, which naturally de-
stroyed much of its usefulness. But it was right in
principle, and Boyle gives Guericke all credit for its
invention.

In 1658 Boyle went to London to look for an

The First Bishop of Science 157

"artist" capable of carrying out some improvements
which he had devised for Guericke's air pump. He
found a certain Robert Hooke and brought him back
to Oxford. After months of work and trial the "pneu-
matical engine" was finished, and the experiments
began.

It was a curious-looking machine which Boyle
and Hooke constructed and it must have been a ter-
rible thing to handle, but it worked, which was more
than any previous device had done. The essential
part was a brass cylinder with a piston operated by a
gear wheel and crank. The large glass "receiver" was
set in cement over the intake pipe and at the top was
a brass cover which could be removed to insert the
various objects on which Boyle proposed to experi-
ment. There were no valves. A brass cock had to be
turned after each stroke of the piston to keep the
air from seeping back through the leather washer,
and "sallet oil" was poured liberally over all work-
ing parts to lubricate them and discourage leaks.

As soon as the machine was finished Boyle set en-
thusiastically to work investigating the properties of
the vacuum. The first thing he did was to prove the
"spring" of the air by placing partly inflated bladders
in the receiver and removing the air from around
them. The bladders swelled and eventually burst.
Next he filled with water a U-tube closed at one end

158 Crusaders of Chemistry

leaving a small bubble at the top. As the air was
pumped out, the bubble grew until it filled the whole
leg of the tube. The spring of the air was demon-
strated. There seemed to be no limit to its spring.

At this point it looks as if Boyle became so fasci-
nated with his new toy that he forgot science for a
time and amused himself with innumerable interest-
ing but useless experiments. He put everything he
could think of into his vacuum to see what effect it
would have on them. Fruit, human blood, lighted
candles, boiling pitch, camphor, and gunpowder.
And especially living animals. Many were the but-
terflies, sparrows, and mice who died for the sake of
science and Boyle's curiosity. But he must have been
a soft-hearted man after all, for once when he left a
mouse overnight in the receiver, he made it a soft
bed of paper scraps, and gave it a bit of cheese to
console it during the long hours until morning. And
when he found it still alive, he let it go free, saying
it had suffered enough for any one mouse.

But in spite of these diversions, Boyle was a real
scientist, which meant that he had a quantitative
mind. It wasn't enough that the vacuum had a re-
markable effect on many things. He must measure his
vacuum accurately and find out whether it was the
same as the mysterious space above the mercury of a
barometer. This brought him to the crucial experi-

The First Bishop of Science 159

ment, which was to place a barometer in the re-
ceiver and see if its mercury fell as the air was re-
moved. If it did fall, it would prove that the mer-
cury was held up by the pressure of the atmosphere,
and the doctrine that Nature abhors a vacuum would
be thrown on the scientific scrap heap with the con-
stant speed of falling bodies and the central position
of the earth in the universe.

It was almost with a feeling of excitement that the
calm and collected Robert Boyle turned the brass
cock and let the air from the receiver rush into the
cylinder of the pump. The mercury in the barometer
fell several inches. Nature had lost her last fully cer-
tified emotion. The "abhorrence" theory had fallen,
and with it fell much of man's theological habit of
mind.

From here it was an easy step to the complete for-
mulation of Boyle's Law, the fundamental law of
gases, which has not undergone any essential modi-
fication to the present day. It states simply that the
volume of a gas is inversely proportionate to the pres-
sure. It is so simple and so well known that we are
apt to take it for granted, but never did a discovery
lead to greater consequences. It was the first real
fruit of the scientific method, the first conspicuous
proof that the most intimate rules and regulations of
the universe could be detected by experiment.

160 Crusaders of Chemistry

The discoveries of modern science require so much
technical preparation and such elaborate apparatus
that the layman seldom hopes to understand how
they are made, but in the days of Boyle, the appara-
tus and calculation were so simple that anyone could
understand them. The average schoolboy could have
made all the momentous experiments on gases in the
average woodshed.

Boyle took a long glass tube and bent it into a
U-shape with one leg much shorter than the other.
He sealed the short end and poured in enough mer-
cury to fill the curved bottom, taking care to tip and
shake the tube until the mercury in both legs stood
at the same level. This proved that the air in the
sealed leg was at the same pressure as the atmosphere.
Then he pasted strips of paper on both legs and
marked carefully the horizontal line passing through
both surfaces of the mercury. He divided the strips of
paper above this line into equal spaces so that any
changes could be easily measured.

The object of the experiment was this to see if a
column of mercury long enough to double the pres-
sure of the atmosphere on the air in the short leg
would reduce the volume of that air by one half. The
barometer that day stood at 29^ inches rather re-
markably low, but in the Seventeenth Century peo-
ple were not particular about barometers. This

The First Bishop of Science 161

meant that the air in the closed part of the tube was
already under pressure of 29^ inches. If it took an
additional 29^6 inches to compress it to half its
volume, the hypothesis would be proved, and the
scientific method would have gained its first great
victory.

The calm and collected Boyle actually was ex-
cited this time. He admits it grudgingly in his notes.
He took a funnel and began to pour mercury into the
open end of the ,tube. His assistant watched the
closed end, and when the air in it was reduced to half
its former volume, he motioned to his master to stop
pouring. Boyle put down his funnel, and noted "not
without delight and satisfaction" that the mercury in
the open tube stood higher by the same magic 29^
inches. Boyle's Law was born, and Robert Boyle at
the age of thirty-two had built himself a lasting
monument. Most men do no more than cut their
names on a slab of stone. Boyle carved his name and
law on the resentful minds of fifty million schoolboys.

Boyle's work on the properties of gases and the
furious controversies which followed the theo-
logical-minded plenists were hard to silence gained
him a great reputation, but probably his discoveries
in chemistry had more far-reaching consequences.
The science of chemistry had taken great strides since
Paracelsus put the medieval alchemists on the de-

1 62 Crusaders of Chemistry

fensive, but its general theories about the constitu-
tion of matter were, if possible, more confused than
even Paracelsus had turned the alchemists to the pro-
ductive business of compounding drugs, but he hadn't
told them much about the make-up of the materials
they worked with. In fact the mystical passages and
numerous contradictions in the works attributed to
him encouraged a sort of inspirational chemistry
which produced more noise than results. Since his
death the chemists had discovered a great many new
compounds and reactions and had made great ad-
vances in technology, but they knew little more
about the rules that governed their experiments than
they did before. The three "principles," sulphur, salt
and mercury, which Paracelsus added to the Aris-
totelian "elements/ 7 earth, air, fire, and water, only
increased the confusion, for the distinction of the
elements as the constituents and the principles as the
qualities of all matter was too hazy and difficult for
any two men to agree on. As Boyle expressed it, "Me-
thinks the vulgar chymists are like the ships which
Solomon sent to Tarshish. They bring back not only
gold and silver, but also peacocks and apes'' a re-
mark which contained not only truth but humor, the
latter quality very painfully rare in all his works.

When the modern chemist speaks of an element he
means a substance which cannot be broken down by

The First Bishop of Science 163

chemical means. The Peripatetic chemists who
flourished before the time of Boyle meant something
very different. The four elements, earth, air, fire, and
water were the four fundamental constituents which,
compounded together in varying proportions, formed
all substances. There was a disagreement about
whether an element could exist in a free and pure
state. Some of the Peripatetics felt safer in saying
that it could not. This headed off any skeptical per-
son who wanted to see "pure fire" for instance, or
"pure earth."

Unfortunately there were a great many substances
hard to classify under any of these heads which de-
fied all attempts to break them down into simpler
forms. The metals were most intractable. Gold, for
instance, could not be broken down, nor was it a pure
element. The same was true of silver, mercury, and
various other substances such as sulphur and certain
precious stones.

Paracelsus saw these difficulties and decided that
substances contained not only one or more of the
four elements, but also varying quantities of what
he called the three principles, sulphur, salt, and mer-
cury, which he was very careful to state were not the
definite substances we now call by these names. They
were subtle, semi-material "attributes" which gave
to mixtures of the four elements their various char-

164 Crusaders of Chemistry

acteristics. Sulphur was the principle of inflamma-
bility. It was contained in all substances which would
burn. Mercury was the principle of volatility and
fluidity. It was contained in all liquids and solids
which would give off vapors when heated. Salt con-
tributed "fixity." It was the predominant quality in
all non-volatile non-inflammable substances such as
stone, quick-lime, and sand.

This was bad enough, but some of the chemists
went further. Van Helmont, for instance, a leading
chemist only a little before Boyle, insisted solemnly
that he possessed the "alcahest" or universal solvent
which could reduce all matter to the "primitive
atoms" common to all substances. It was an astonish-
ingly long time before anyone thought to ask him if
he really had this alcahest what kind of a vessel he
kept it in.

These various theories had been developing a long
time and had become exceedingly confused. No two
chemists agreed. Each one could point out flaws in
the theories of all the others. But the system of ele-
ments and principles was so vague and allowed so
many varying interpretations that to refute it com-
pletely was like trying to catch an eel in a muddy
pond on a dark night. The Peripatetics couldn't
agree on anything, but they had so confused the issue

The First Bishop of Science 165

that no one could disprove conclusively anything
they said.

Here was a task worthy of the "careful and doubt-
ing Boyle" and a true test of the scientific method.
The previous attempts to find a firm basis for chemi-
cal reasoning had failed because the chemists tried to
improve on the theories of the past, and these theories
were fundamentally wrong. There are no elements
making up all matter, and any amount of modifica-
tion of the four-element theory wouldn't improve
things. A new start had to be made, and Boyle de-
cided that he was the man to make it.

Here is where the scientific maxim, "State noth-
ing which you can't prove," was first applied to
chemistry. The early theories had inherited the four
elements from antiquity. They tried to reconcile the
facts with the theory. Boyle started with the observed
facts and tried to find a definition for an element
which did not conflict with them.

He reasoned something like this. "Most substances
are compounds. We can prove this by separating
them into other substances. Some, however, we can-
not break down. So let's for the present call them ele-
ments, and if they continue to resist our efforts to
break them down, we shall continue to call them
elements. But once a substance is decomposed, it at

1 66 Crusaders of Chemistry

once loses rank as an element and becomes a com-
pound."

This, of course, is good reasoning and the kind of
reasoning every scientific worker now applies to
every problem. Start with what you have and try
to build up something better, being careful not to
be led astray by attractive theories which do not agree
with all the facts. But in the time of Boyle it was
something of a novelty. The fashion of the day was
to pray for inspiration, take deep thought, evolve a
perfect, complete theory, and then try to find facts
to uphold it.

With immense labor and infinite pains Boyle set to
work on the program he'd laid out for himself. He
was a very rich man now, for the gradual quieting
down of civil troubles had restored his estates intact,
and he spared no expense for materials, apparatus,
and assistants. His account of his work is tedious
and badly arranged like all his writing, but his
method shines through his words with a quite suffi-
cient light of its own. It was very simple. He took
each substance in turn, from human blood to ice-
land spar, and applied all known methods in hopes
of decomposing it. Some substances yielded at once
to heat and separated into "phlegm, oil, and ash,"
thus proving that they were compounds or mixtures.
Some, like the various ores, required more compli-

PRIKSILIY'S pneumatic tiough

i ROBERT BOYLE testing nature's "abhorrence of a vacuum "
2. A HUMBLE MARTYR to science a mouse m a pneumatic jar

The First Bishop of Science 167

cated methods. And some, notably the metals, resisted
all treatments and remained unchanged. These Boyle
placed in a class by themselves and for the time called
them elements.

The results of these researches he published in a
small book which appeared in 1661. It was called,
with the pomposity of the age in the matter of titles,
The Skeptical Ghymist, or Considerations upon the
experiments usually produced in favor of the four
elements and the three chymical principles of mixed
bodies. It isn't exactly what you'd call light reading,
nor does it resemble the sharp and concise, if com-
pletely colorless, articles of the modern scientist For
tediousness, bad arrangement, and verbosity, the
books of Boyle have few rivals. But this was the lit-
erary fault of the age ; it was what people expected,
and The Skeptical Chymist made a tremendous hit
with the "philosophical" minds of the time. Boyle's
conception of an element was what the world had
been waiting for, a sort of guide post to lead the
science of chemistry through the confusion which
had been steadily growing since man first began to
ask the why and wherefore of chemical phenomena.

Of course Boyle did not apply his method rigor-
ously to all substances and discover all the elements.
This was beyond the equipment of the period, and
Boyle, who touched on every subject from the salti-

1 68 Crusaders of Chemistry

ness of the sea to the conversion of the New England
Indians, had other things to think about. But the idea
of a chemical element which can not be decomposed
still remains the central concept of the science.

These two discoveries, Boyle's Law and the chemi-
cal element, concern very different problems, but
they had one remarkable thing in common. Each was
a successful attack upon a mistaken scientific doctrine
which had been established so long that it was almost
an article of faith. They were not made, like so many
scientific discoveries, by a small-minded man who
stuck to his work until he found out something im-
portant. Not at all. Boyle surveyed the intellectual
scene, decided that the current theory rested on shaky
foundations, and proceeded by reason and observa-
tion to build anew from the ground up. He was not
afraid of the accumulated opinion of the past. He
cleared away all dogmas inherited from the Middle
Ages and built his structure on the solid bedrock of
personal observation. This doesn't sound very re-
markable to modern ears. All scientists work that
way now, or pretend to. But to do it in the Seven-
teenth Century when the dead hand of the past was
still heavy, and to do so successfully, raises Boyle far
above the patient fact-gatherers into the class of
Newton, Lavoisier, and Einstein.

This remarkable intellectual independence, this

The First Bishop of Science 169

freedom from the influence of the past, calls up a
picture of Boyle as a freethinker, an innovator,
anxious to call for a new deal and rebuild the world
on a new and more rational basis. Nothing could be
more untrue. Boyle's mind had in it two idea-tight
compartments. On the scientific side it was rational,
skeptical, unconvinced by anything but rigorous
proof. On the other, the theological side, his mind
was moral, conservative, unexperimental ; he sighed
inconsolably for the good old age of faith, which
then, as now, seemed to have passed forever.

During a visit to London under the Common-
wealth, Boyle wrote a letter which illustrates how he
felt about the religious instability of the times. Lon-
don was a parade ground of all extreme Protestant
sects of Europe, and Boyle was disgusted with it. He
unburdens himself thus:

"Few days pass here that may not justly be
accused of the brewing or broaching of some
new opinion. Nay some are so studiously chang-
ling in that particular that they esteem an
opinion as a diurnal, after a day scarce worth the
keeping. If any man have lost his religion, let
him repair to London, and I'll warrant him he
shall find it. For my part I shall always pray
to God to give us the unity of the spirit in the
bond of peace."

170 Crusaders of Chemistry

The last phrase is significant give us the unity of
the spirit in the bond of peace. In modern language
it means about this "Let's decide what we're going
to believe and shut up about it." This is a strange
opinion for a scientist. Men of science, if they are
good ones, never hope for final decisions. They know
from long experience that the best theories fall, that
new discoveries undermine the most solid doc-
trines of the past, that even the theories which re-
main standing will be pushed into the background by
greater discoveries to come. They know that this ap-
plies to morals and government as well as to science.
The real scientist does not hope for a final settle-
ment of anything or expect one. He knows that the
only permanent thing in the universe is change.

But Robert Boyle was not entirely a scientist; he
was a transition phenomenon between a past which
wanted to believe and a future which was to hope
eagerly for a chance to doubt. When he was thinking
on purely scientific matters he was clear, logical, he
never took anything on faith ; he tested every theory
himself, and if he found it faulty, he said so without
hesitation. But when he locked the door of his labora-
tory, when his furnace was cold and his "pneumatical
engine" was quiet for the night, then he felt the
tradition of a thousand years drawing him back to
the peace, the tranquillity, the unquestioning faith

The First Bishop of Science 171

which he feared the world had lost forever. He went
to church and listened carefully to the sermons, hop-
ing against hope for proof that the cherished doc-
trines of Christianity were on sounder foundations
than his reason led him to fear. He mourned the
passing of Christian unity, hoped that all the
churches, sects, and quarreling individuals would get
together and work for the establishment of peace and
justice on earth. But he found little to cheer him. The
sermons he listened to so devoutly how thin and
silly, how wrong-headed they sounded beside the ser-
mons preached by his retorts and balances. How
much less they told him about the world. Each
opinion of each eminent divine could be refuted in
just as convincing language in the very next church,
while a fact taught by the laboratory might be incon-
clusive and unimportant, but was certainly based on
something better than the dogma of the past.

Boyle was one of the first great scientists of the
modern era. He was one of the first to use rigorously
the scientific method with its mechanism of observa-
tion, hypothesis, and proof. But he didn't do this
without regret. He wasn't quite sure that science was
good for the world, and the tremendous amount of
time he spent apologizing in print for his scientific
activities is good proof of this. The scientific method,
although advanced by Aristotle, by Roger Bacon,

Crusaders of Chemistry

was a new thing in the modern world, and was still
under fire as a dangerous rival to religion. Boyle felt
this deeply. Never was a man more torn between two
spiritual desires. His mind worked scientifically. He
couldn't stop it. Everything he observed he added to
his stock of knowledge for use in testing the theories
it touched. But he was never free from a vague feel-
ing of guilt. What if this monster, science, should
finally defeat religion? What if facts should grow
until they pushed faith out of the hearts of men?
Boyle was uneasy and troubled in his mind. Perhaps
he was nourishing a monster which would destroy
everything he loved and cherished in the world. But
he went on. A born scientist like Boyle can't stop
thinking because he fears that his thoughts may be
dangerous to humanity.

It was in 1663. The Protectorate had fallen.
Charles the Second was on the throne, and Boyle,
although known to have Puritan leanings, found
himself in a position of great influence. Not only was
his reputation as a philosopher at a very high point,
but his numerous brothers who'd fought for the king
were almost all-powerful at court. Roger Boyle, who
had the good fortune to change sides at the psycho-
logical moment, was made Earl of Orrery and Presi-

The First Bishop of Science 173

dent of Munster. Richard Boyle became Earl of Bur-
lington and an important creditor of the king. Frank
Boyle became Viscount Shannon. And greatest honor
of all, his pretty wife, Betty Killigrew, became the
king's mistress and the mother of one of his all too
numerous children.

Perhaps the moral Boyle looked somewhat askance
at this crowning honor. The chances are he did.
But he knew that kings from the time of David on
had picked the fairest flowers where they grew. It
was nothing new and in 1663 Boyle had other wor-
ries. The conflict in his soul between faith and scien-
tific skepticism had suddenly come to a head. He
could avoid a decision no longer. The Restoration
had made him the most powerful and conspicuous
natural philosopher at the court of Charles the Sec-
ond. And Charles the Second had just granted a lib-
eral charter to the Royal Society.

Well, why not? Why shouldn't the "Royal Society
of London for Improving Natural Knowledge" have
a charter? According to modern ideas it certainly
should. But the Seventeenth Century saw the matter
differently. Ever since the time of Henry the Eighth,
England had been torn by the struggle for domina-
tion of three religious groups, the Catholics, the
Anglicans, and the Protestants. Many heads had fal-
len under the ax, and many piles of white ashes had

174 Crusaders of Chemistry

cooled slowly in village squares. But these three
groups had differed only in such points as ceremony,
doctrines, or church government. No one of the three
had shown the slightest tendency to deny the
authority of revelation, the inspired nature of the
Bible, or the power of God to modify by miracle the
natural laws of the universe.

And now came natural philosophy, the wolf in the
sheepfold, the cankerworm eating away the heart of
faith, the hated new doctrine which proclaimed to
the world that it didn't believe anything which
couldn't be proved. Quite correctly the three re-
ligions read the faint handwriting on the wall. They
saw that unless this common enemy was crushed, they
would all have to retreat into a gradually shrinking
domain of the spirit where science could not pursue
them.

Boyle was not the only founder of the Royal
Society, which had for many years held meetings
under the name of the Invisible College, but he was
the most conspicuous among them, and he had used
his power at court in obtaining the charter. So it was
upon him that the storm of protest broke.

"Do you not realize," wailed the bishops, "that this
natural philosophy tends toward the destruction of
all religion, true and false? Do you not forsee the
inevitable downfall of civilization if the feeble

The First Bishop of Science 175

human race should insist on judging for itself in-
stead of following the word of God?"

This might have been expected from the Estab-
lished Church, but it wasn't only the bishops who
thundered. All the conspicuous leaders with semi-
theological minds rallied to the attack. Hobbes, who
had no love for the clergy, joined in. Butler threw
his barbed lampoons. And Henry Stubbs, a copious
pamphleteer with a large following, wrote to Boyle
most earnestly:

"I beseach you, sir, consider the mischief it
hath occasioned in this once flourishing king-
dom, and if you have any sense, not only of the
glory and religion, but even of the being of your
native country, abandon that constitution. It is
too much that you contribute to its advancement
and repute: the only reparation you can make
for that fatal error is to desert it betimes. Do
you not apprehend that all the inconveniences
that have befallen the land, all the debauchery
of the gentry (which ariseth from that pious
and prudent breeding, which was and ought to
be continued) will be charged to your account?
It will be impossible for you to preserve your
esteem but by a seasonable relinquishing of these
impertinents."

But Boyle was an older man than when he wrote
his very pious "Occasional Reflections," and he'd

176 Crusaders of Chemistry

been struggling with scientific problems too long to
be turned aside by any amount of righteous denuncia-
tion. So he stuck to his guns, and the Royal Society
flourished unmolested. It even became fashionable,
the merry king in his elegant clothes performing
simple experiments with his own hands.

At times Boyle felt certain misgivings. What
would be the end of all this? Perhaps he and his
friends were sowing a whirlwind which would sweep
away all the structure of morality which his pious
heart loved so well. But the logical side of his mind
wouldn't let him change his course. He still went
on, apologizing from time to time in marvelously
dull and extended discourses on the usefulness of
science, its helpfulness to true religion, and its neces-
sity to the Christian state.

Finally the Church tried bribery. Boyle was
offered a bishopric, the provostship of Eton any-
thing if he would only be ordained and put the seal
of his approval on the doctrines of religion. But
Boyle smiled as he wrote a polite and evasive re-
fusal. He was already a bishop, the First Bishop of
Science, and his church was the Royal Society.

The Chemical Revolution

CHAPTER VI
The Chemical Revolution

THE scientific method, that stern doctrine, points
out a straight and narrow path for the feet
of its devotees, and woe to the scientist who turns
aside to pick a flower growing off the beaten track.
He holds up his bright prize, and the world ap-
plauds. But the flower fades at once, and he has to
pick another to conceal the fading of the first. Each
step takes him farther from the firm ground. The
earth grows boggy under his feet; his followers at
last desert him, and he sinks to an unhonored grave
marked only by a few supercilious lines in the his-
tory books of science.

This preacher's allegory of the "straight and nar-
row path" has been used in every religion to force
obedience to various rules from absolute celibacy
among the early Christians to the prohibition of but-
tons among the Mennonites, but to science it applies
particularly well. Every scientist is tempted to con-
struct a gaudy, sweeping theory on a basis of too-
few observations, and then to ignore subsequent ob-

179

1 82 Crusaders of Chemistry

With true scientific energy Stahl repeated his ex-
periment. It worked every time. It worked with iron,
with zinc, with mercury, with sulphur. The theory
was perfect, and the late Seventeenth Century cele-
brated the discovery of phlogiston as one of its major
achievements.

There were certain troublesome details, of course,
but they quickly retreated before the triumphant ad-
vance of Stahl's theory. If, for instance, lead is heated
with air in a closed vessel, the air loses some of its
volume. "Why is this?" asked the skeptical. "If
phlogiston has been added to the air and nothing
taken away, why isn't the volume of the air greater
instead of less?"

"Phlogiston is not an ordinary substance," replied
Stahl. "When it combines with air, the volume of the
compound is less than that of the original air." And
no one could contradict him.

Another difficulty was that a metal deprived of
its phlogiston weighed actually more than before.
This caused a momentary flurry in the phlogiston
camp, but the attack was safely beaten off, leaving
the cherished doctrine more beautiful and sym-
metrical than ever.

"Phlogiston," said the faithful, echoing the words
of Stahl, "is not an ordinary substance, and therefore
it does not have ordinary weight. It is the principle

The Chemical Revolution 183

of fire, of motion, of levity. It has negative weight.
Observe how the air above a fire leaps upward. It has
acquired phlogiston, and is therefore lighten So it

rises."

This quieted the critics for a time. The law of con-
servation of matter was not yet proved, only sus-
pected. Negative weight was not considered impos-
sible. And phlogiston lived on as triumphant as ever.

Toward the end of the Eighteenth Century the
phlogiston theory celebrated its seventy-fifth birth-
day in a hale and hearty condition. Seventy-five is
very old for a scientific doctrine, and the phlogiston
theory had grown a long white beard and collected a
devoted following of orthodox chemists who shouted
"Heresy!" whenever their faith was attacked.
Phlogiston was entrenched in the textbooks, in the
schools, in the minds of the gullible learned who
were as numerous then as now. Every new discovery
had to agree with it or be denounced as an ipso facto
error. When hydrogen was isolated, for instance, the
phlogistians scored a great triumph. Here was their
phlogiston itself, or at least a substance containing a
very large amount. It burned with violence; it re-
stored "dephlogisticated" metals to their former state,
and most notable of all it was so much lighter than
air that it might very likely have actual negative
weight.

184 Crusaders of Chemistry

But at this very moment of triumph, the enemies
of phlogiston were gathering. New discoveries were
announced on every side. New methods of dealing
with gases allowed experiments to yield accurate
quantitative results. And a spirit of skepticism was
abroad in the scientific world such as had not been
seen since Robert Boyle smashed the Peripatetics
with the deadly long-windedness of The Skeptical
Chymist.

The overthrow of the phlogiston theory was called
the chemical revolution. It probably got its name
from analogy with the French Revolution which
happened at the same time, but it was a real revolu-
tion nevertheless. It jolted men's minds out of their
comfortable grooves. It destroyed a cherished doc-
trine which had been taught for decades, and it laid
down the basic principles on which chemical research
has proceeded from then to the present time.

The credit for the chemical revolution goes chiefly
to three men, two Englishmen and one Frenchman
Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, and Antoine
Laurent Lavoisier. Each one played his part, the
Englishmen contributing the most important discov-
eries, and the Frenchman, after the manner of
Frenchmen, putting them together in a complete and
orderly theory. In this chapter we'll consider the dis-
coveries themselves, and show how each was a step

The Chemical Revolution 185

toward the revolution. Then in later chapters we'll
deal with the three chemists as men. They were very
different, these three, and they arrived at their con-
clusions by very different methods. But each one is
a fascinating study of genius.

Up to the middle of the Eighteenth Century
science didn't know much about gases. They were all
thought to be modifications of air, or mixtures of
air with various vapors, spirits, or fumes. It was this
ignorance which allowed the phlogiston theory to
live so long. If Boyle had carried his scientific work
a little farther, the phlogiston theory would never
have been born. Gases are the most docile and
amenable of chemical substances. They are limited
in number. They react quickly and form compara-
tively simple compounds. But unless the chemist has
special apparatus to handle them, they are elusive
and inconspicuous, difficult to distinguish from the
innumerable bad smells of the laboratory. A key in-
vention was needed which would allow chemists to
deal with gases effectively.

The key invention was made by Priestley. It was
called the "pneumatic trough," and was so simple
and perfect that there was probably a great chorus of
"Why didn't 7 think of that." The pneumatic trough
is nothing but a large vessel containing water a few
inches deep. Priestley used an earthen washtub. A

1 86 Crusaders of Chemistry

shelf with several holes is placed just below the sur-
face. Wide-mouthed bottles filled with water are in-
verted over the holes, and tubes are passed upward
into them. The gas rises into the bottles, replacing the
water. When one bottle is full, it may be slid aside,
and another substituted. Never did so simple a de-
vice fill a crying need more perfectly. There was no
danger of loss of gas or contamination with any-
thing but water vapor, and this could be avoided
when desirable by using mercury instead of water.

Equipped with this homely device, Priestley got
to work, starting with carbon dioxide, or "fixed air,"
which he obtained from a near-by brewery. He didn't
discover much of scientific value. Carbon dioxide was
to remain something of a mystery for many years.
But he did observe that the gas dissolved in water
had a "pleasant acidulous taste" and he developed a
method of making "an exceedingly pleasant spar-
kling water which could hardly be distinguished
from very good Pyrmont or rather Seltzer water."
He passed the hint to a commercially minded friend
who bottled the first soda water, which he called "the
Mephitic Julep." Thus Priestley, besides being one
of the several "fathers of chemistry," is the unchal-
lenged patron saint of the soda fountain. Which may
or may not be a credit to him.

The next gas Priestley tackled was "inflammable

The Chemical Revolution 187

air," or hydrogen. This had been known for a long
time, for the most addle-headed alchemist could
hardly help observing it bubble off when a metal was
dissolved in weak acid, but it had never been investi-
gated thoroughly. Most chemists who knew anything
at all about inflammable air thought it was phlogis-
ton. Priestley thought so too, and his first experiment
was intended to prove it.

He took a quantity of "dephlogisticated lead,"
which we call lead oxide, placed it at the top of a tall
glass cylinder inverted over water and filled with
inflammable air. Then he waited for a sunny day and
heated the oxide with a large burning glass. It be-
came black, turned into metallic lead, and the in-
flammable air disappeared at a great rate, drawing
the water up into the cylinder. Priestley rejoiced.
He thought he had certainly proved that inflam-
mable air was phlogiston for it restored dephlogisti-
cated lead to its metallic state without leaving any
residue. Of course we know now that water was
formed in the cylinder. But Priestley had no way of
observing this, for the cylinder was full of water al-
ready. Even when he used mercury, the amount of
water was so small that it might easily have come
from the imperfectly dried hydrogen or from the
oxide itself.

Priestley repeated this experiment on various

1 88 Crusaders of Chemistry

metallic oxides with the same result The inflam-
mable air reduced them all. Nothing else appeared
to be formed in the process. He felt sure he'd found
the genuine phlogiston.

By this time it was 1774 and Priestley was about
to make his most important discovery. Encouraged by
the success he had with the combination of pneu-
matic trough and burning glass, he set to work try-
ing to extract an "air" from every substance he could
lay his hands on. He isolated sulphur dioxide, am-
monia, silicon fluoride among others. But his crown-
ing triumph was the red oxide of mercury.

He placed some of this in a glass bottle, filled the
bottle with mercury, and turned it upside down in a
vessel containing more mercury. The oxide rose to
the top, and Priestley heated it through the glass
with his invaluable lens. An air was given off which
soon filled the bottle.

Priestley transferred his new air to a cylinder
standing over water and found that it was not "im-
bibed" as the ammonia and silicon fluoride had been.
And on trying to ignite it with a candle he found that
not only did it refuse to burn, but the candle itself
flared up with tremendous brilliance and burned with
a white flame until all the air was exhausted. Priest-
ley, needless to say, was astonished and delighted.

The Chemical Revolution 189

Nothing like this had ever been seen before. He
jumped to the conclusion that this air was completely
dephlogisticated, contained no phlogiston at all, and
so allowed the phlogiston in the candle to escape
more rapidly. Priestley had made perhaps the
greatest single discovery in chemistry, but he never
realized its magnitude. His obstinate conviction that
his discovery was not a new gas, merely "dephlogisti-
cated air," prevented him from any really valuable
conclusions. This was left for Lavoisier.

As early as 1770 Lavoisier had been convinced
that the phlogiston theory was a delusion. For one
thing, he had firm faith in the law of conservation of
matter, and he considered the negative weight of
phlogiston ridiculous. All matter, said Lavoisier,
weighed something at least. "But phlogiston," said
the faithful, "is not ordinary matter. It is matter
transmuted into something else. And if you don't be-
lieve that matter can be transmuted, evaporate the
purest water and observe the 'earth' left behind.
Water has been transmuted into earth. And this
proves that some things in the world are beyond the
power of your theory to explain."

The reasoning here is a bit muddy, but the phlogis-
tians had raised a very real objection to the theory
that a chemical element can enter into combinations

190 Crusaders of Chemistry

with others, but cannot change into another element
or vary in weight. Lavoisier saw that all the reason-
ing he intended to use to destroy phlogiston would
fall to the ground unless he removed this objection.
If he couldn't prove that the elements were inde-
structible, he couldn't prove anything by the careful
quantitative demonstrations he had in mind. His
opponents would always be able to take refuge in
vague references to "transmutation" and "other
kinds of matter."

The delusion that distilled water was transmuted
into earth had remained unchallenged up to this
time because no one had been able to weigh with suf-
ficient accuracy the glass vessel in which the water
was evaporated. The amount of earth left behind by
the water was so exceedingly small that the large
scales necessary to weigh the vessel could not detect
any loss of weight. Lavoisier reasoned that if, in-
stead of merely evaporating the water, he should heat
it for a long time in the same vessel, enough glass
would be dissolved to register on his scales.

Lavoisier was certainly patient. He heated the
water nearly to boiling for no less than one hundred
and one days, and when he finally evaporated it he
obtained 20.4 grains of earth more than a gram,
and enough for any good balance to deal with ac-
curately. Then he weighed the vessel and found that

The Chemical Revolution 191

it had lost 174 grains, which was near enough to
prove his point The water was not transmuted into
earth. It merely dissolved a small amount of the glass
from the vessel. Lavoisier had demolished the chief
objections to the law that the elements are inde-
structible. Now he could go ahead with firm ground
under his feet

The first thing he did was to repeat the celebrated
experiment by which Stahl proved that charcoal "re-
stored phlogiston" to "dephlogisticated" metals. He
heated lead oxide and charcoal together in a cylinder
on Priestley's pneumatic trough and found that, in-
stead of merely exchanging phlogiston, the two sub-
stances gave off a gas which he identified as the
fixed air which Priestley got from the brewery. Here
was something new for the phlogistians to explain.

The next step was a crucial one. The phlogiston
theory maintained that when a metal burned it gave
off phlogiston of negative weight and thus became
heavier. Lavoisier now proceeded to demonstrate
that what really happened was that the metal com-
bined with part of the air and thus gained as much
weight as the air lost To do this he had to carry out
the whole experiment in a closed system^jgr^ he
wouldn't be able to weigh the air after
combined with part of it The apparatus ^
so simple and ingenious that it's worth d

192 Crusaders of Chemistry

is still used whenever quantitative work has to be
done on gases.

Lavoisier put a weighed amount of granulated tin
in a glass retort with a narrow tubular opening, drew
out the tube to a thin hair and sealed it with a blow-
pipe. He then heated the tin until it had formed as
much oxide as it would. No air or anything else had
entered the retort, and therefore the whole apparatus
weighed as much as before. Lavoisier let the retort
cool, and broke off the glass filament. The air rushed
in with a hissing sound to replace the part absorbed
by the tin. The weight of this additional air was
found by weighing again the retort and its contents.
Lavoisier then weighed the tin and tin oxide and
found that they had gained exactly as much as the
whole apparatus had gained when the air was al-
lowed to enter. He had proved that when metals are
burned they do not lose phlogiston, but absorb from
the air a substance which increases their weight by
exactly as much as the air loses.

This was exceeding interesting; it confirmed
Lavoisier's disbelief in phlogiston. But it wasn't final.
He didn't know what it was the tin had taken from
the air. He needed another fact before he could
offer a complete explanation. By a fortunate acci-
dent this fact was given him at just the right time.

In 1774, while Lavoisier was engaged on this prob-

The Chemical Revolution 193

lem, Priestley visited Paris and was entertained by
Lavoisier at a dinner "with most of the philosophical
people of the city." He mentioned his new dephlogis-
ticated air, in which a candle burned so brilliantly,
and explained how he got it from mercuric oxide.
Lavoisier "expressed great interest," and well he
might, for here was the information he needed. No
doubt he waited impatiently for the next morning
when he could go to his laboratory and make some
dephlogisticated air of his own.

Now mercuric oxide is peculiar stuff. If you heat
mercury nearly to its boiling point in air, the oxide
forms slowly on its surface, but if you heat it any
hotter, the oxide breaks down, forming mercury and
oxygen again. It is what chemists call a "reversible
reaction." Priestley may have known this, but he
made no use of it. Lavoisier did. He heated mercury
nearly to boiling for twelve days in a closed retort.
The mercury absorbed eight cubic inches of air, and
a small amount of oxide formed on its surface.
Lavoisier collected the oxide, heated it strongly, and
expelled from it eight cubic inches of dephlogisti-
cated air, which behaved exactly as Priestley said it
Would and proved that the mysterious gas was noth-
ing else than the constituent of air which combined
with metals to form oxides.

Lavoisier was so encouraged by this that he rather

194 Crusaders of Chemistry

lost his head and began to generalize a bit too soon.
When he found that the new gas would combine with
carbon, sulphur, or phosphorus to form substances
whose water solutions were acid, he jumped to the
conclusion that dephlogisticated air was the "acid-
forming element." So he coined the name "oxygen,"
which means "acid former" in Greek, and the name
has stuck ever since, although it should have be-
longed to hydrogen instead.

This discovery was a pretty bad blow to phlogis-
ton, but still it wasn't conclusive. There was one more
thing to explain. "This is all very interesting," said
the faithful, "and perhaps true. But why does inflam-
mable air restore dephlogisticated metals to their
metallic state?" Lavoisier couldn't answer. He was
stumped again. He needed another new fact from
England.

For the present let's leave Lavoisier rather dis-
comforted by this counter-attack and consider Cav-
endish, who was about to find the fact which, like
the key-piece of a Chinese puzzle, would make all
the others fit together into a symmetrical pattern.

Cavendish had been investigating off and on for
some time the properties of hydrogen, or inflam-
mable air. At the suggestion of Priestley he decided
to explode a mixture of dephlogisticated air and in-

The Chemical Revolution 195

flammable air in a closed vessel so that he could cap-
ture whatever was formed. If inflammable air was
phlogiston, as he thought, and dephlogisticated air
was air deprived of its phlogiston, as Priestley
thought, a combination of the two in the proper pro-
portion ought to give nothing but ordinary air with
its normal amount of phlogiston. With great tech-
nical skill Cavendish exploded various mixtures of
the gases. Never did he find anything left but a sur-
plus of one or the other. And when he used two parts
of hydrogen to one of oxygen, the water over which
his vessel stood rose actually to the top, occupying
nearly all the space where the gases had been. It was
easy to see that no ordinary air was formed.

Cavendish was baffled for a while, but finally he
remembered that several years before Priestley had
demonstrated to James Watt Stahl's famous experi-
ment of using inflammable air to reduce lead oxide,
and that Watt had noticed a small amount of water in
the vessel. Neither Watt nor Priestley attached much
importance to this at the time, agreeing that the water
probably came from the imperfectly dried hydrogen.
But now Cavendish saw the light. He exploded an-
other mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, over mercury
this time instead of water, and found that a quantity
of water was formed whose weight was exactly that

196 Crusaders of Chemistry

of the two gases. Which proved that water, instead
of being the typical simple substance, as all earlier
chemists had thought, was a compound with a defi-
nite formula which we now write IHUO.

When Lavoisier heard about this, he ran to his
laboratory with what would have been, had he not
been an atheist, a thankful prayer to the Lord. Here
was the last bit of information he needed to complete
his theory. Now everything was clear. Lavoisier
made a few confirmatory experiments, and rushed
into print. Phlogiston had finally fallen.

Lavoisier's theory of combustion, on which all
modern chemical reasoning is based, was simple and
complete. It can be stated in a few lines. The air
consists of two gases. One of these, oxygen, combines
with metals and other combustible substances to form
oxides. When it combines with hydrogen it forms
oxide of hydrogen, or water. Hydrogen can take the
oxygen from a metallic oxide, forming water, and
leaving the metal behind. That was all. No more was
needed. The litter of phlogistonism was cleared
away, and chemistry could build up firm theories on
firm foundations.

Such was the chemical revolution, and seldom has
a change of scientific opinion had as far-reaching
consequences. For the first time the chemists touched
bottom, penetrated the labyrinth of conflicting

The Chemical Revolution 197

theories and observations, and captured the few
simple but potent truths which were all they needed.
From here on the progress of the science was rapid
and continual, without a single backward step. Old
mysteries were cleared up almost daily. New discov-
eries came in rapid succession. And modern scientific
civilization, which is founded on chemistry, could
celebrate its first birthday.

Before ending this chapter let's say a few kind
words for Stahl and his phlogiston theory. It caused
a tremendous amount of confusion and did a great
deal of harm, but, looked at broadly, it wasn't so far
from the truth after all. Stahl merely saw things in
reverse. If instead of saying that burning substances
give off phlogiston, he had said that they absorb it
from the air, he would have been as nearly right as
could have been expected. Oxygen takes part in all
ordinary combustions, and to call it phlogiston, the
"fire substance," isn't very far off.

The trouble with the phlogiston theory was that it
became a dogma of the theological-minded. It in-
spired too much blind devotion. Men were de-
termined to stick to it in the face of contradicting
facts, and were willing to go to almost any extremes
rather than give it up. The clear and rational start
which Boyle had made with his Skeptical Chymist
was forgotten completely when science was hypno-

198 Crusaders of Chemistry

tized by Stahl's seductive theory. It took the vision
of Lavoisier and the revolutionary discoveries of
Priestley and Cavendish to penetrate the smoke
screen raised by the followers of Stahl around the
fundamental problem of combustion.

Joseph Priestley, the Minister Who Wanted
To Believe

CHAPTER VII

Joseph Priestley, the Minister Who Wanted
To Believe

THE Dissenting congregation of Needham
Market had taken a new minister on trial, and
this was his first Sunday service. No one had seen
him yet except a few of the elders, and curiosity
was intense. The chapel was a small and poor one,
but it was full to the doors. The arrival of a new
minister meant a lot in 1755. Even the stay-at-homes
were there.

They couldn't hope for much, thought the con-
gregation gloomily. All they offered was forty
pounds a year, hardly enough for a farmhand, let
alone a minister. He'd have to live on two shillings
a day and rent a house for himself into the bargain.
So with more apprehension than hope they watched
the little door behind the pulpit.

"He's only twenty-two years old," they thought,
"and that's in his favor. An experienced minister
for forty pounds a year would be a strange creature
indeed."

201

2O2 Crusaders of Chemistry

The door opened and the new minister took his
place in the pulpit. He was rather tall, rather good-
looking, with an open gentle face and a pleasant
smile. He made a very good impression in the first
few moments while he looked through the Bible for
his text. But when he began to speak a frown of
annoyance spread over the faces of his listeners. He
stammered. He stammered painfully. He'd say a few
words in a soft musical voice, then stop dead while
his jaw moved rapidly and a strangling sound came
from his throat.

The congregation squirmed nervously until the
spasm was over and the soft voice was flowing
smoothly again. There'd be a few fine sentences, as
fine as they'd ever heard. Then the gasping silence
would begin again, and they'd fidget on their benches
and pray for the nice young man who was having
such a terrible time up there in the pulpit.

The sermon went on, however, for the new min-
ister had courage and determination. The Lord had
afflicted him, for some good reason no doubt, but
they all could see what a fine young man he was.
After the service was over, the congregation broke
up into little groups to discuss their new spiritual
leader.

"His name's Priestley, is it? That's a poor name
for a Presbyterian, but it's no fault of his. The

Joseph Priestley 203

stammer is terrible, but the words are good when
they come. He's a learned young man all right."

"Is he sound on the Trinity?"

"That we don't know" this from an elder. "He
talks above our heads entirely. All Latin and Greek.
But he's learned, and the more a man knows the
sounder he is on the Trinity. Only the ignorant deny
the truth."

"And what a nice friendly smile he's got" this
from a woman. "Perhaps he'll get over his stammer.
Perhaps he was nervous because of his first service."

The elders had a meeting that afternoon and voted
to retain Priestley in spite of his stammer. Perhaps
they were influenced by other matters than his
qualifications. Every previous minister had de-
manded the full forty pounds, ten of which came
from a handful of stiff-necked Independents whose
presence in the congregation made nothing but
trouble. But Priestley offered on his own initiative
to do without the ten pounds for the sake of getting
rid of these trouble makers. The Independents with
their noisy sternness were forthwith ejected, and the
little congregation felt that this alone was worth
many a stammer.

During the three years that followed, Pries* 1
lived a painfully isolated life. His congregation was
small, poor, and ignorant, mostly tradespeople and

2O4 Crusaders of Chemistry

workmen. He had few points of contact with them.
He didn't understand them, nor they him. But they
let him rather completely alone on matters of
doctrine, and he let them alone on matters of money
and church government. He respected their ability
to handle their own affairs, and they respected his
learning. It wasn't every congregation that could get
such a minister.

"He's got a book in his study a foot thick," said
an elder in an awed voice, "and it's printed with
letters like nothing I've seen before."

"That's a Hebrew concordance, so he told me. It
cost him three guineas, so he said. And the Lord
only knows where he got the money. It's a month's
salary. But if he wants to put his pay into books
instead of victuals, it's none of our business. We get
the benefit of the books through his reading them.
We'd get nothing from the victuals."

So passed the first three years of Priestley's life
as a minister. He very nearly starved, and he very
nearly died of loneliness. And he was tortured by a
guilty suspicion that if these people knew what he
really thought, they'd feel that the three years of
his ministry had brought them a good deal too near
the fires of hell. Perhaps he should tell them? Per-
haps he was living a lie? But no. He wasn't sure
yet in his own mind. Hidden among the crabbed

Joseph Priestley 205

letters of his Hebrew, the graceful fronds of his
Syriac, the pleasant music of his Greek, he had
found things which made him doubt. But he didn't
know the whole truth yet. Perhaps the roots of the
faith were buried deeper still. Until he'd found out
he'd keep silent and try to preach to these good
people in words they could understand. They paid
him as much as they could afford; they stood for
his stammering; they admired his learning. They
deserved the best he could give.

Such was Joseph Priestley in his early twenties,
the stammering minister of a feeble congregation.
Totally unknown, totally without resources; earn-
ing the wages of an agricultural laborer and nearly
starving in an atmosphere of Hebrew, Syriac, and
Greek. Let's see what brought him to this position
of learned but painful poverty.

The house of the Priestleys at Fieldhead in York-
shire was long and low and picturesque. It stood on
four distinct levels, its gables climbing uphill like
a flight of stairs. It was surrounded with a wall cov-
ered with vines. You'd never have taken it for a
factory, but a factory it was. For this was before the
industrial revolution, and Jonas Priestley was a
weaver.

206 Crusaders of Chemistry

Nowadays, when we think of a weaver, we visu-
alize a puny, half-starved creature who stands in the
midst of a score of domineering machines and listens
fearfully for the sound which tells him that some-
thing has gone wrong. He gets paid just enough to
keep his feeble body and feebler soul together, and
if he's wise he checks his individuality at the door
on the day he gets his job. His function in the
factory is something like the function of the duo-
denum in the body. He supplies raw material for the
machines to work on, and he eliminates waste prod-
ucts such as snarls and broken threads. His char-
acter resembles that of the duodenum quiet and
not too full of hope.

But in the early Eighteenth Century things were
very different. The weavers were independent manu-
facturers on a small scale, and very much in charge
of their own affairs. They acknowledged no superior;
they received no wages. They owned their home,
their workroom, and their looms. In short, they
were just the "sturdy yeomen" about whom demo-
crats sentimentalize so fervently to-day without
noticing that the class disappeared a hundred years
ago.

The Priestleys were weavers and cloth finishers
rather more prosperous than most, and they thought
very well of themselves. In the previous generation

Joseph Priestley 207

some of the family had gone into trade and become
rather wealthy, and the fact that there was no barrier
of occupation between the two branches of the
family shows the substantial position of the weavers
in their small communities.

Many of the weavers, and the Priestleys among
them, were Calvinists, for the north of England, al-
though it had supported the king in the civil wars
a hundred years ago, had become a stronghold of the
most rock-like variety of Presbyterianism. No
Puritan divine of early New England could excell
the Dissenting ministers of Yorkshire in theological
frightfulness, and to most of the members of their
congregations, the flames of hell were as real and
near at hand as the fire on the kitchen hearth.

It was into such a household that Joseph Priestley
was born in the year 1733. He was the eldest son,
and five more children followed in the rapidest pos-
sible succession. Since this increase in the family
put a strain on the accommodations at home, he was
sent to live with a grandfather who had more room.
When he was six years old his mother died in child-
birth, and the family was broken up. Joseph was
considered the most promising boy, and his father's
sister, Mrs. Sarah Keighley, offered to take full
charge of him and see that he got a good education.

208 Crusaders of Chemistry

The offer was accepted at once. Joseph left his
father's home for good.

This change is what started him on an intellectual
career. Otherwise he would probably have become
a weaver like his father, for although Jonas Priest-
ley was "God-fearing," "sturdy," and all that, there's
no reason to think that his mental horizon was any
wider than his weaving and the harsh doctrines
preached in the local chapel. But with Aunt Sarah
things were very different Her husband was a man
of considerable wealth, and her home at Leeds was
the meeting place of all the ministers in the surround-
ing country. She was a Calvinist, or called herself
that, but she was broadminded within certain limits,
and she liked to hear all shades of religious opinion
expressed freely around her hospitable tea table.
When Joseph Priestley was twelve years old he was
allowed to sit in a corner while the ministers talked.
Children of this age have usually very little interest
in the doctrines of infant damnation and original sin,
but Joseph looked forward to these discussions with
tremendous interest. He said nothing. Self-conscious
children who stammer know better than to talk. But
he listened carefully, and if he didn't understand a
tenth of what he heard, he did master very com-
pletely the principle that in matters of religion only
the least intelligent men are orthodox on all points.

Joseph Priestley 209

And if a child's learned this, he's learned something
most adults never do.

All this was wonderfully fortunate for Priestley,
the future scientist, and wonderfully fortunate for
the world. As we shall see later, Priestley had an
orthodox streak in his character. He wanted to be-
lieve the opinions of the past. If he'd been trained in
early youth to accept at its face value every rigid
doctrine accepted by the people around him, this
trait might have dominated his character, and the
world would have gained one more orthodox divine
and lost a fruitful scientist. But the atmosphere of
his aunt's household was liberal, and Priestley grew
up to think for himself and investigate with open
eyes the shaky doctrines which the orthodox pro-
fessed to be so sure about.

His schooling was informal and irregular. His
health, which was never very good, did not allow
him to follow any rigid course. But he was naturally
studious, and he learned by himself far more than
most boys learned under the strictest discipline.
When he was nineteen he entered Daventry The-
ological Academy to prepare for his natural pro-
fession, the ministry.

For a theological academy, Daventry was a rather
unusual place. The spirit of inquiry was fostered,
and the students were urged to read as much as

2io Crusaders of Chemistry

possible, whether the books they read agreed with
current Presbyterian doctrine or not. Discussion was
encouraged, and every opinion advanced by a
student, no matter how radical, was considered
worthy of a serious hearing. There was no censor-
ship of ideas, no flustered covering up of doctrinal
flaws. The slogan, so often proclaimed but seldom
applied, that "truth will prevail" was the actual
motto of poor obscure little Daventry Academy.

When Priestley became famous, when his name
was known from one end of Europe to the other, he
had the pleasure of boasting about his humble Dis-
senting college to the Oxford-bred Prime Minister
of England himself:

"Shutting the doors of the universities against
us, and keeping the means of learning to your-
selves, you may think to keep us in ignorance
and so less capable to give you disturbance. But
though ignominiously and unjustly excluded
from the seats of learning, and driven to the
expedient of providing at a great expense for
scientific education among ourselves, we have
had this advantage, that our institutions, being
formed in a more enlightened age, are more
liberal and therefore better calculated to answer
the purpose of a truly liberal education. Thus
while your universities resemble pools of stag-
nant water secured by dams and mounds, ours

Joseph Priestley 211

are like rivers, which, taking their natural
course, fertilize a whole country."

After his graduation from Daventry Priestley
filled various pulpits and taught at Warrington
Academy near Manchester, but everywhere he was
pursued by the same problem. He knew too much.
His mind was too absorbent for the ministry. He
wanted to believe. He tried hard to believe, but he
also tried hard to find out the truth, and although
these two activities are proclaimed constantly to be
identical, they are decidedly not as any minister
will tell you if you gain his confidence. Priestley
read many languages all languages in fact which
had any application to theology or natural philoso-
phy. He knew the Bible almost by heart, and he
formed the habit of looking through it for the roots
from which the various doctrines of Christianity had
grown. Often he found none, or insufficient ones.
Still hopeful, he'd resort to the difficult original
languages the Hebrew, the Greek and hope to
find clear proof among their twisted letters. But no.
He got no confirmation here either, and he had to
admit he was puzzled painfully puzzled.

At this point it might be remarked that Priestley
was a bit naive. He was na'ive very naive. Never did

212 Crusaders of Chemistry

a more trusting soul attack a more untrustworthy sub-
ject. His mind at this period was working like that of
a scientist. He actually thought that the doctrines of
religion could be tested as you can test the belief
that the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of
the squares of the other two sides. He didn't realize
that scientific reasoning and religious reasoning are
fundamentally different; that while a scientific belief
is only as strong as the facts which support it, a
religious belief needs no such roots. It is like an
orchid which sprouts in the crotch of a tree and
develops roots later if at all.

After Don Quixote had attacked the windmills
so valiantly, it is likely, although it is not recorded,
that he soon found something more substantial to
attack the owner of the windmills, for instance.
So it was with Priestley. The type of reasoning he
had been applying to religion was purely scientific,
and he naturally got no more results than Don
Quixote got with his lance. Soon he turned with a
mighty sigh of relief to problems which were solid
enough to get a grip on, problems which would
come out in the open and be defeated. In this in-
direct way Priestley approached natural philosophy.
He discovered many things for which the world
should be, and is, duly grateful. But he never quite
abandoned theology. At the bottom of his heart he

Joseph Priestley 213

always felt that science was a rather empty, shelly
thing, not nearly so essential to human happiness as
religion with its great problems of faith and moral-
ity. We shall see how this fundamental theological-
mindedness affected to the day of his death the nature
of all his scientific work.

Priestley's first activity in science was very humble
indeed. While at Needham Market he tried to eke
out his meager salary by giving twelve lectures on
"The Use of a New and Correct Globe of the Earth."
He had only ten listeners, and the whole proceeds
hardly paid for the globes. But Priestley wasn't dis-
couraged. He had the globes, which was what he
really wanted ; he'd had a good time talking about
them; and he wasn't starved yet. When he moved
to his next church at Nantwich in Chester, he opened
a school which was an immediate success. For the
first time he had enough money to buy the "phil-
osophical instruments" he longed for a small air
pump and an electrical machine which he trained his
pupils to operate and keep in order. Priestley was an
excellent teacher, and the parents of his pupils were
very completely satisfied with his work. But the
pupil that learned most was Priestley himself. He
had apparatus; he had leisure; he had plenty of
willing boys to help him. And when in three years
he moved on to teach at Warrington Academy, he

214 Crusaders of Chemistry

was well started on the road toward scientific knowl-
edge.

Priestley's activities at Warrington give an idea
of the scope of his interests. He wrote and lectured
on every subject which retained his attention for
even a moment, and his writings found a ready
market in that pamphlet-consuming age. He was a
born pamphleteer, never rewriting, never composing
painfully, but setting down the thoughts as they came
to him, and setting them down in final form ready for
the printer. He wrote on biography, on education,
on economics, on a dozen different aspects of the-
ology. At this period he published nothing on
science. He didn't know enough for even a pamphlet.
But the turning point came during a visit to London
in 1766, for it was then that he met Benjamin
Franklin.

In 1766 Franklin was one of the most conspicuous
figures in London. He and his friends in Parliament
were fighting the great battle for the American
Colonies which resulted in the repeal of the Stamp
Act. He was courted by statesmen and fought over
by society, but somehow he found time for more
purely intellectual matters. And when he met Priest-
ley at the home of a "philosophical friend," he
recognized in the serious, stammering young minister
the great talents which as yet no one else had noticed.

J, r k I K

^ K

JOS P p H ]>KI I STL I Y

The Unitarian preacher who fled from English mobs

to America and became the first great Amencam/ed

chemist.

Joseph Priestley 215

It must have been a strange friendship which de-
veloped between Franklin and Priestley between
the perfect self-made man of the world and the shy
young scholar from the land of cloth and Calvinism.
Franklin was sixty years old then and Priestley only
a little more than thirty. Franklin was a wise old
diplomat who'd risen to international importance
from the greasy obscurity of a Boston tallow shop.
Priestley was a scholarly recluse whose life was ab-
stract thought and speculation alone and who had no
interest in political or social prestige. But their
friendship developed nevertheless and lasted in its
intimacy all through the American Revolution to the
year of Franklin's death in 1790.

Now Franklin had various talents, some of which
patriotic Americans pretend to forget, but his chief
talent was for the judging of men. When he met
Priestley he sized him up at once as a man of first-
rate ability whose energies were being wasted in non-
productive fields. Theology, English grammar, elo-
cution! These, thought Franklin, were sorry subjects
for a great mind to work on. Leave them to small
minds, the smaller the better, for when there's noth-
ing to discover, it's a shame for a good mind to waste
itself in searching.

Franklin was strong on good advice. He probably
gave more good advice than any man in history, and

ai6 Crusaders of Chemistry

he knew how to adapt his advice to the needs of the
advisee. His greatest triumph in this respect was
when he urged Priestley to write a history of elec-
tricity and offered to supply him with the necessary
books and information. Never was a better suggestion
given at a more opportune time. Priestley knew very
little about natural science, but he had the intel-
lectual equipment to learn. Compiling a history of
electricity was just the task to get him started. He'd
have to learn what had been done by others; he'd
have to test their experiments with actual apparatus,
and if he made a good job of the book he'd win an
ample reward in praise and publicity trust Frank-
lin and the Royal Society for that. Almost all the
available information about electricity was contained
in the Philosophical Transactions of the society, and
even in the Eighteenth Century scientific institutions
were duly grateful when their publications were
quoted as the final authorities.

Everything came out exactly as Franklin had
hoped. Priestley went back to Lancashire fired with
a new and burning enthusiasm and loaded down with
copies of the Philosophical Transactions. In a little
more than a year the history was finished and was a
great success. Its publication gained Priestley im-
mediate recognition as a man of science and secured
his election to the Royal Society.

Joseph Priestley 217

About this time he left Warrington Academy and
moved to Leeds to take charge of a liberal congre-
gation which enjoyed having a famous natural
philosopher for its minister. It was perhaps the free-
dom which his tolerant church allowed him, or per-
haps a desire for recreation after his scientific labors,
but at any rate Priestley now indulged in a prolonged
orgy of theological writing. The presses had a hard
time keeping up with his agile pen. He wrote on
every imaginable subject from "Family Prayer" to
"The Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion."
And before he'd been at it long, he found himself
at the storm center of the most violent sort of re-
ligious controversy.

There's no use going deeply into Priestley's
theological opinions. No subject is more obscure and
meaningless to the modern mind. But one divergence
from the orthodox faith is worth mentioning, for it
caused most of the trouble that was coming to Priest-
ley and had a profound effect on his later life. He
gradually became a Unitarian, or, as it was more
commonly called then, a Humanitarian. He believed
that Jesus was a man, inspired perhaps, but not a
God or a son of God. This seems a harmless thing
to believe, but in that day nothing could have been
more radical or dangerous. There's a twist in the
religious mind which makes a heretic much more

2, 1 8 Crusaders of Chemistry

hateful than an unbeliever. The intellectual leaders
of the time were atheists or freethinkers almost to a
man, and the faithful seemed reconciled to the situa-
tion. But when Priestley became a Unitarian, he
brought down on his head all the concentrated wrath
of the godly. Even Gibbon, that arch enemy of
Christianity, denounced him in no uncertain terms,
apparently because he thought a minister of religion
should stick to the fundamental doctrines or leave
the Church entirely.

The chorus of abuse which assailed Priestley's
Unitarian opinions would have been a fine show for
a man who could enjoy it. He was denounced in
mellow tones from the dim aisles of the Established
Church, in shrill screams from the chapels of the
Dissenters, and in the deep bass of the natural phi-
losophers who thought with Gibbon that ministers
of religion should stay strictly on the reservation.
But Priestley could not enjoy it. He was deeply hurt
at the reception of his doctrine. He had a mind which
made him investigate and doubt, but deep within his
heart he was like Robert Boyle. He wanted to be-
lieve. We'll see presently how he found a faith, and
how sadly that faith betrayed him.

Up to this time Priestley had done little work in
chemistry. He knew almost nothing about the science,
and consequently when he started to learn he turned

Joseph Priestley 219

to the published works of the past. This is all right
in theory. It's just as well to know what has been
done before you start work yourself. But in this case
it was very unfortunate, for the textbooks of the time
were full of the fair but false phlogiston theory,
and Priestley was hypnotized by its misleading ap-
pearance of perfection. "Here," he said, "is the
truth. Fve searched through the Scriptures and
found nothing but confusion. I've examined the
science of electricity and found nothing but isolated
and unconnected facts. But here is a firm founda-
tion. Here is a solid something to start with."

Then and there Priestley dedicated his scientific
life to the phlogiston theory and stuck to it through
thick and thin. He lavished on it all the devotion
which his skeptical mind would not let him give to
any of the hard-and-fast systems of religious dogma.
And what a poor subject of devotion it was! Priest-
ley was like a very uninspired rat running up the
hawser of a ship about to set sail for Davy Jones's
locker.

The results of this bad choice of scientific faith
did not appear at once. For a time all was serene.
The phlogiston theory was wrong, but it wasn't a
bad leader to follow for a short distance. It wasn't
due for complete destruction until Priestley himself
had discovered the facts which finally destroyed it.

Crusaders of Chemistry

Working, as he thought, to prove the ultimate truth
of the phlogiston theory, Priestley unwittingly be-
came one of the three fathers of the chemical revolu-
tion which forced it to the scientific junk heap.

When Priestley began his chemical work he was
living at Leeds, and the building next door was the
public brewery of Jakes and Nell. This institution
was appreciated by all the neighbors, but by Priest-
ley doubly so, for not only did he use its finished
product on occasion, but the carbon dioxide given
off by the fermenting beer was the subject of his first
chemical research. This gas, then known as "fixed"
or "mephitic" air, had been investigated more or
less, but only imperfectly. The best authorities, such
as they were, thought it was u phlogisticated air" or
air which had taken up as much phlogiston as it
could and which therefore would not support further
combustion. Priestley held to this opinion to the end
of his life although the very discoveries which he
made himself had proved it incorrect.

At this period he knew very little about chemical
apparatus, and he had no money to buy the apparatus
he did know about. Far from being a handicap, this
proved a tremendous advantage for it made him de-
velop ingenious methods of his own which turned
out far more accurate than any used by his pre-
decessors. He was forced, for economy's sake, to use

Joseph Priestley 221

the objects he could pick up around the house, and
a large earthen washtub was the first thing he
selected. Next he made a wooden shelf which fitted
into the tub and stood a few inches off the bottom
on cleats. In this he bored a number of holes. A few
glass jars from the pantry and a little glass tubing
completed the device. So far it had cost almost noth-
ing. The only part which had to be paid for was the
tubing, and since this was made merely by pulling
out a glass bulb, it was nearly as cheap then as now.
No doubt the outfit looked rather crude when Priest-
ley put it together, but to the present day no real
improvements have been made upon it. We don't use
washtubs or preserve jars, but we could if we wanted
to, and we'd get just as good results.

Laden with this curious apparatus, Priestley pro-
ceeded to the brewery and was welcomed by the
brewer, who was probably glad of a chance to get
on good terms with the clergy. He set his tub on a
barrel near one of the fermenting vats, filled it and
the jars with water, and inverted the jars over the
holes in the shelf. Then he bent a length of the glass
tubing over a spirit lamp so that one end would stick
up into the mouths of the jars and the other rest on
the rim of the vat just above the bubbling beer. He
took his finger from the upper end of the tube. The
gas rushed into the jar, replacing the water, and

222 Crusaders of Chemistry

Priestley had the first pure sample of carbon dioxide.

This doesn't sound like much of a scientific experi-
ment, and in one sense it was not. But it illustrates
how Priestley worked, how he used common sense
to solve problems which had baffled men more skill-
ful and experienced than he. All previous attempts
to isolate a pure gas had failed, for some air had
always got into the bulbs and globes of Priestley's
predecessors. He took his gas from a pure source,
the covered vat, and allowed it to touch nothing but
water, which dissolved some of it, but left the rest
uncontaminated.

Priestley filled all his jars with the gas, sealed
them carefully, and bore them back in triumph to
the shed he used as a laboratory. At this stage he
didn't know what it was he had in the jars. In fact
he never did know exactly, for the phlogiston theory
always managed to get between him and the truth.
But he had the gas safely in his jars, and he set to
work to learn its properties.

It must be admitted that he didn't learn much at
this time. He was too much of a beginner. But he
did make one discovery which, although hardly
scientific, did win him great renown. This was the
invention of soda water. He noticed that the water
over which fixed air had stood absorbed a certain

Joseph Priestley 223

amount of the gas and acquired a "pleasant acidulous
taste." For some obscure reason he thought the solu-
tion would cure scurvy. The Admiralty, to which
the matter was brought, thought so too, and Priest-
ley's apparatus was installed on two of His Majesty's
battleships. So when Englishmen wax scornful about
soda fountains, the patriotic American may point out
that the first two were set up by the British Navy
itself.

The invention of the pneumatic trough and the dis-
covery of soda water won Priestley great recognition,
and the Royal Society gave him the Copley Medal,
the highest honor in its power to bestow. Nor was this
all. Lord Shelbourne, late Secretary of State under
the elder Pitt, offered him a position as "literary com-
panion" with a salary of two hundred and fifty
pounds a year two and a half times what he was
getting at Leeds. Priestley accepted after some hesi-
tation, and for the first time in his life was free of
all financial worries and able to buy the equipment
to carry on his research.

While Priestley was living with Lord Shelbourne
at Calne he did the greater part of his productive
work. His duties as literary companion were very
light indeed, and Lord Shelbourne saw to it that he
had everything he needed. It was here that he dis-

224 Crusaders of Chemistry

covered oxygen and the other gases so important to
chemical theory, and it was here that he wrote the
books which have made him immortal as a chemist

We have explained in the preceding chapter the
significance of Priestley's discoveries. Perhaps no
single man has made more important observations.
His notebooks were a mine of scientific hints for
many years. But the most striking thing about Priest-
ley was that he never realized the full importance
of his work. He discovered oxygen, but he never
admitted that oxygen existed, maintaining to the last
that it was only air deprived of its phlogiston. He
was the first to observe the formation of water from
its constituents, but he attached no importance to it.
He made many other observations of the utmost im-
portance, but never drew from them correct con-
clusions. While experimenting with carbon dioxide
he tried growing some mint in a jar of the gas. The
mint grew marvelously well, and Priestley was
amazed to find that the gas in which it had grown
would once more support the flame of a candle. He
was within reach of the fundamental discovery of
biological chemistry, the carbon cycle, but he went
no further.

While trying to make carbon dioxide by heating
limestone in a gun barrel, he got a large quantity of
a gas which burned with a blue flame. This was

Joseph Priestley 225

carbon monoxide, but Priestley brushed it aside with
the remark that it must come from the remains of
the animals whose skeletons formed the limestone.
The credit for discovering carbon monoxide goes to
Cruikshank.

So it was with all Priestley's work. He was a won-
derfully alert observer. He was accurate and pains-
taking. He was ingenious to the point of inspiration.
But almost never did he draw a correct conclusion.
The phlogiston theory always got in the way. Priest-
ley's mind was free free from dogma social and
religious. But it was not free from the curious human
craving for intellectual bonds. He was like an old
circus horse which, when turned out to graze in a
wide pasture, imagines that the ring still encloses
him and gallops sedately around a small and perfect
circle at the center of the field. Priestley rejected
the Athanasian Creed and all other creeds. He re-
jected the political philosophy of the age of George
the Third. But when he attacked chemistry, his real
life work, he felt the need of support from the past,
and he chose the phlogiston theory, which was even
then showing unmistakable signs of decay.

Science needs the Priestleys. It needs the skillful
fact-fishermen. But it also needs the tough-minded
thinkers like Boyle and Lavoisier who can discard
the obsolete theories of the past and build up new

226 Crusaders of Chemistry

structures of thought on new and firm foundations.
Priestley never did this. He was satisfied with the
past. He thought the phlogiston theory needed only
a little strengthening to stand forever. And when it
did fall, Priestley almost alone among men of science
remained faithful. The arch heretic, denounced for
his radicalism from every pulpit in England, clung
with pathetic loyalty to a doctrine which was much
more completely dead than any of the religious
creeds he'd tried so hard to destroy.

These are hard words to apply to so great a man.
"Conservative" and "orthodox" are the most insult-
ing epithets in the vocabulary of science, for science
is like a stalk of coral, alive only at the growing tip.
And it's the height of irony that these expressions
should come to be applied to Priestley of all men.
Only in the matter of phlogiston was he dogmatic.
In other fields, religious and political, he was as
radical as any man in England. He was attacked for
his opinions by pulpit and press. And he was finally
driven into exile to end his career three thousand
miles from the center of the "philosophical life" he
loved so much. To be at peace with Priestley's kindly
and earnest ghost, we'll have to consider the other
side of his curious dual personality, the radical side
of him which almost cost him his life.

Priestley, like Boyle, lived during a period of

Joseph Priestley 227

crisis. The French Revolution was just over the
horizon, and it cast its dark shadow a long way ahead.
The industrial revolution was just beginning. Re-
ligion was being challenged fundamentally as it
had never been challenged before. And the structure
of government, which had remained essentially un-
changed for nearly a century, was being savagely
attacked on numerous fronts. All along the line the
upholders of the established order were nervous
the bishops, the landowners, the great merchants,
the members of Parliament, and the king himself.
And well they might be, for presently they'd look
across the channel and see their fellows in France
strung up on lamp posts, torn to pieces in the streets,
or driven into exile.

On July 14, 1789, came the destruction of the
Bastille, and a shudder of apprehension ran through
the governing classes of Europe. Guilty consciences
awoke and resolved to be more guilty in future or
they'd never get a chance to be guilty again. Gar-
risons were strengthened in populous centers. New
laws against sedition were enacted and the old ones
polished up. The press was watched more closely.
And very useful was that tried-and-true weapon of
reaction, the appeal to religious prejudice.

In 1780 Priestley had left Lord Shelbourne, who
couldn't quite stand for some of his ideas, and moved

228 Crusaders of Chemistry

to Birmingham to preach to the congregation of the
New Meetinghouse, one of the most liberal in Eng-
land. By this time he had earned the well-deserved
hatred of the Established Church. The Church did
not fear the Deists and Agnostics who denied religion
altogether, for it knew very well that these doctrines
had no popular appeal. But Priestley it did fear and
with good reason. His Unitarian doctrines were just
what it didn't want to see established, for Unitarian-
ism, while appealing to the fundamental human
craving for religion, denies the existence of those
mystical details like the Trinity and the Sacraments
which are the chief support of priestcraft.

If Priestley had stuck to science and theology, he
would probably have escaped physical violence at
least, for the government after losing the American
war was in no mood to crusade in favor of the
Church. But in those days theology led directly into
politics by way of the Corporation and Test laws
which excluded all non-members of the Church of
England from voting or holding office. Priestley led
the attack on these laws with the characteristic
vehemence which he showed when a matter of prin-
ciple was involved, and it wasn't long before he was
also denouncing the rotten system of representation
in Parliament which kept such laws on the books.

These activities brought Priestley much notoriety

Joseph Priestley 229

and disapproval from on high. But for a time all
was serene. He preached a little, experimented a
little, and wrote volumes on science, religion, and
politics. He was free from financial worries, he was
courted by the great and the less great, and he was
recognized as a prominent leader of liberal thought.

But after the fall of the Bastille, all this was
changed. When there's revolution in the air, the mild-
est dissatisfaction with conditions as they are begins
to look like sedition. The Dissenters, the Catholics,
the embryonic labor unions, and the philosophical
friends of liberty in general all came under suspicion.
And Priestley naturally among them. He began to
get threatening letters. Some of his weak-kneed pa-
rishioners stayed away from church when he
preached. And when he traveled down to London
he noticed a certain coldness among the members of
the Royal Society.

In Birmingham itself the feeling of tension in-
creased rapidly until July 14, 1791, when the crisis
arrived. For some days the city had been in an up-
roar over an inflammatory handbill which had been
found in a public house and circulated widely by
Priestley's enemies. Priestley, of course, denied any
knowledge of it, but the harm was done. The lowest
classes of the population were convinced that the
Dissenters and Liberals were planning a massacre,

230 Crusaders of Chemistry

or at least the destruction of organized government
and religion.

For July i4th the Liberals of the city had planned
a dinner in celebration of the second anniversary of
the Fall of the Bastille. It was to be a great feast of
oratory in honor of British liberty as compared to
the conditions which had brought on the French
Revolution, and many respectable and conservative
citizens had planned to attend. But as the date drew
near, the list grew smaller and smaller as the more
timid made their excuses, and after the incident of
the handbill the promoters decided to call it off.
,They prepared a notice to this effect, but changed
their minds at the very last minute on receiving
assurances from the owner of the hotel where the
dinner was to be held that no trouble was likely.
They didn't suspect until later, nor was it ever
proved, that the hotel keeper had made his peace
with the instigators of the riot. But the rioters did
not attack the hotel. They waited in very unmob-
like silence until the banquet was over, and didn't
start their work until a leader raised the rallying cry
of "Church and King."

Priestley did not attend the dinner. He had been
warned by his friends that his presence might make

Joseph Priestley 231

trouble. That evening he sat at home playing back-
gammon with his wife. It was a mild occupation
which took perhaps one tenth of his attention and one
hundredth of his intelligence. He threw the dice
with an appearance of interest and made the simple
moves authorized by their faces, but his mind was
far away from Birmingham, from his wife, from
backgammon. Just then he was thinking of a scene
in Cracow two hundred years before when Faustus
Socinus, an early Unitarian, had fled from the city
before a mob and looked back to see the long yellow
flame from his burning house proclaiming to the
cornfields of Poland that Christ after all was a God.

Birmingham was a long way from Cracow, and
two hundred years was a long time, but, thought
Priestley, he'd been hearing that word "Socinian"
rather often of late. He was used to being called
names from the pulpits, and the things the clergymen
said about him had long since ceased to matter.
But "Socinian" from a crowd on a street corner had
a different sound. Ominous, like all words which
the mob snarls out but does not understand.

"Someone," thought Priestley, "must be teaching
the people that 'Socinian' has a hateful meaning,
that the poor dead word is alive and powerful, fit
to mingle with catcalls and hisses; that a man who
wears it is a traitor, a blasphemer, and a rebel."

232 Crusaders of Chemistry

He threw his dice again and moved his counters
on the painted board. From the back of his mind
came a Latin verse which formed the epitaph on the
tomb of Socinus :

"Tota licet Babylon destruxit tecta Lutherus
Muros Calvinus, sed fundamenta Socinus. 99

("Luther destroyed the houses of Babylon, Cal-
vin the walls, but Socinus uprooted the founda-
tions.)

"You'd think," thought Priestley, "that these
Protestant English would applaud a man who de-
stroyed the mystical foundations of the Roman edifice
they hate so intensely. But no. That's not the way
things work. They want the foundations left intact,
so that they themselves may build a comfortable
structure on them and be comfortable deans and
bishops within it."

Priestley shook his head sadly and threw the dice
again. "The way of the transgressor may be hard,"
he thought, "but it's nothing to the way of the man
Who thinks for himself. After all, he's the real trans-
gressor. He breaks great rules while the thief and
the adulterer break little ones."

Priestley threw the dice again, but before he could
move his men a frantic peal came from the bell in

Joseph Priestley 233

the hall. Doorbells have their language. They can
express urgency if nothing else. Mrs. Priestley
looked up with a start, and Priestley went to the
door without waiting for the maid to open it.

The visitor who'd nearly pulled the bell handle
from its socket was Samuel Ryland, a well-known
Liberal and one of Priestley's staunchest supporters,
He wore no hat and was out of breath.

"Hurry," he panted, "they've burned the New
Meetinghouse. They're burning the Old Meeting-
house. Then they're coming here."

"They'?" asked Priestley. "Who are 'they'?"

"The mob. The people. They waited outside the
Memorial Banquet for you to come out, and now
they're running around the streets with torches and
clubs."

"But I have no quarrel with the people," said
Priestley. "I've spent the better part of my life fight-
ing their battles here and in London."

"They're crying 'Church and King.' They're com-
ing to burn your house. And if they catch you in it,
they'll burn you too, friend or no friend."

Mrs. Priestley seems to have had more presence
of mind than her husband, or perhaps less faith in
human justice. While he was standing dazed and
wondering in the doorway, she gathered up what
money there was in the house, found his coat, threw

234 Crusaders of Chemistry

it over his shoulders, and pushed him into the street.

All that night the cry of "Church and King" was
heard in the the streets of Birmingham. Priestley's
house was burned and the walls pulled down with
wrecking hooks. His laboratory was destroyed, too,
with the precious apparatus which could not be
duplicated in all Europe. The houses of his friends
went next, even their country estates many miles
from the city. Priestley himself fled to London where
he was safe if not welcome. The authorities tolerated
no mob, however friendly, in the capital.

The mob held Birmingham unopposed from
Thursday until Sunday. Priestley's friends tried to
find the magistrates, but they had disappeared. The
city police were gone too. There were some feeble
attempts to organize a volunteer constabulary, but
they had little support and came to nothing. Late
Sunday evening a troop of cavalry rode calmly into
the city. The mob dispersed without resistance. A
pleasant time had been had by all.

Of course the authorities disclaimed all respon-
sibility for the riot, and to give weight to their words
they hanged a few of the more obscure rioters. But
the facts were against them. The mob was not the
usual senseless, howling thing which emerges from
the slums of a great city. It was organized. It knew

Joseph Priestley 235

just what to do. It carried hooks and ropes for pull-
ing down walls, and straw and torches for firing
buildings. It was wholly unarmed. A whiff of gun-
powder would have scattered it. Within a day's hard
ride from Birmingham were plenty of troops, and the
constables of those days went armed to the teeth.
But not a shot was fired. The mob with its hooks
and torches held Birmingham for three days and
three nights until every house and chapel which had
been marked for destruction was reduced to ashes
and rubbish. Only then did the troops appear.

Priestley got a great deal of sympathy from his
friends and from Liberals in general, but little good
did it do him. The Birmingham riots had identified
him in the popular mind with the enemies of Church
and State. Wherever he went he was followed by
threats and abuse. Handbills were scattered about
the streets of London describing him as a rebel and
a traitor and demanding his death. He was burned
in effigy. His servants were afraid to stay with him.
His neighbors moved away in fear of another riot.
His mail every morning brought letters comparing
him to Guy Fawkes, to Danton, to the devil, and
threatening to boil him in oil. His fellow members
of the Royal Society avoided him like the plague,
and in the pulpits of the Established Church his
wickedness and blasphemy were favorite subjects for

236 Crusaders of Chemistry

impassioned sermons. The Rev. Dr. Tatham, rector
of Lincoln College, Oxford, was very emphatic:

"Long have you been the Danger of this
country, the Bane of its Polity, and the Canker-
worm of its Happiness. Long, too long, have
your Principles tended to bereave it of its Re-
ligion, its Constitution, and consequently its
King."

Even Burke, the great champion of American lib-
erty, turned against him and denounced him in the
House of Commons. England was no place for
Priestley. He decided to emigrate.

On April 8, 1794, Priestley and his wife took ship
from London. He went with numerous regrets, for
he was leaving the only life he knew, the life of
philosophical contemplation in the midst of a civil-
ized community, and he was going to a country which
had not yet passed entirely beyond the pioneer stage.
But America of the late Eighteenth Century was the
only refuge for such men as Priestley. Washington
was still President, and the principles of the Consti-
tution and the Declaration of Independence were
still in force. A man like Priestley could be sure of
a hearty welcome and a tolerant attitude toward his
not-very-violent ideas.

He landed in New York on June 4th and was wel-
comed by an enthusiastic crowd at the dock. There

Joseph Priestley 237

were addresses by prominent men and banquets in
his honor. When he reached Philadelphia he was
honored by the American Philosophical Society and
offered by unanimous vote of the trustees the pro-
fessorship of chemistry at the university.

But Priestley was sixty-one now and discouraged.
He preferred to retire with his sons to Northumber-
land on the Susquehanna where they were founding
a colony of English exiles. He went to Philadelphia
several times to lecture and preach, but always re-
turned to Northumberland where he found the peace
his failing health required. He wrote much on the-
ology and did a little research, but his life work was
over.

Only once did he regain any of his old scientific
vigor when he made a last desperate attempt to
revive the beloved phlogiston theory with a pamphlet
called 'The Doctrine of Phlogiston Established."
Needless to say, it came to nothing. Phlogiston was
too dead to resurrect. But Priestley never lost faith
in his one dogma. He died in 1804 at Northumber-
land the prophet of a doctrine honored by all but
its discoverer, a father of the chemical revolution
who did not recognize his child.

Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine

CHAPTER VIII
Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine

THE Royal Society Club had just finished
dinner, and the members were standing about
with the air of great men who thoroughly appre-
ciate their own greatness. One member, it was clear,
was not enjoying himself. He looked nervous, glanc-
ing from face to face, and noting with alarm that
many were strange. He wore very curious clothes,
rather like a family portrait by an indifferent artist,
and he shuffled his feet like a small boy who wishes
he were somewhere else. The other members ap-
peared to be paying very little attention to him, but
when he did speak, which was rarely, a great silence
fell until he was done, which was soon.

The room was crowded. If anyone wished to get
from one end to the other, he had to move in a
viscous medium of men so interested in what they
were saying that they didn't want to stand aside.
From a far corner a little convoy was approaching

a large pompous gentleman followed by another

241

242 Crusaders of Chemistry

gentleman rather more stiff than pompous. It pushed
through the crowd, setting up a disturbance ahead of
it like a ship with a very blunt bow. The nervous
man in the funny clothes detected its approach from
afar and looked even more nervous than before.

At last the convoy reached its destination. The
pompous man, who was Dr. Ingenhousz, addressed
the nervous one, who was Henry Cavendish.

"Mr. Cavendish," he said with ponderous formal-
ity, leading forward his companion, "this is the
Baron von Plattnitz, a man as well known in his
native country, which is Austria, for his philo-
sophical attainments as for his noble birth. He has
asked me for an introduction to you, sir, a pleasure
which he has long anticipated. Allow me to present
the Baron von Plattnitz."

Cavendish looked down at his feet, fumbled the
large buttons on his coat, and made curious motions
with his head and shoulders. He said not a word.
The Austrian gentleman came forward and bowed
profoundly.

"Mr. Cavendish," he began, "I came to London
not for business. I have no business in England. Nor
for pleasure. My own Vienna is much more gay and
amusing. I came solely for the privilege of convers-
ing with you, whom I consider one of the brightest
ornaments of our age and one of the most illustrious

Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine 243

philosophers the world has ever produced. Now that

I have had the pleasure of meeting you "

He stopped suddenly with open mouth. Cavendish
was gone. He had spied an opening in the crowd and
popped through it like a rabbit through a hole in a
hedge. He dashed out the door and down the steps.
He jumped into his carriage and was driving like
mad for his home at the other end of London.

The Honorable Henry Cavendish was a great
aristocrat, descended from numerous Norman con-
querors, connected with royalty in various ways.
Dukes and earls roosted thick as blackbirds in his
family tree, and he possessed that crowning glory of
aristocracy tremendous wealth. But never was a
man less like the traditional great lord. Lacking were
the fine clothes, the cultivated tastes. Lacking were
the polished manners, the inbred arrogance. Lacking
were all social interests, all concern with public
affairs. He lived a life which would have been con-
sidered uneventful by the dullest night-watchman.
He fortified himself against social contacts. He hated
praise and resented compliments. He became one of
the most famous men of his time, but he got no thrill
out of it. What he did in science was for his personal
amusement alone, just as other men in his position

244 Crusaders of Chemistry

killed grouse and broke hearts. The advancement of
science mattered not at all to him. He just didn't
care. He was a measuring machine.

Cavendish was born in 1731 at Nice, where his
mother had gone for her health. It might have been
a different date or a different place, for neither date
nor place had any effect on Cavendish. If he'd been
born a hundred years earlier in Nova Zembla, we
can be sure that this coldest of warm-blooded
creatures would have lived just the same, measuring
the ice and desolation of Nova Zembla in the same
spirit as he measured the physical and chemical
qualities of England.

He went to school at Hackney. But we know no
more than the plain fact. He left no memory or
tradition behind him. He never confided to anyone
the emotions and struggles of his schooldays. There
probably were none. He studied at Cambridge for
four years and left without a degree, perhaps because
of the religious test required before a degree could
be conferred. Cavendish had no religious opinions,
and the pale glitter of an M. A. after his name was
not sufficient bait to draw from him even the feeblest
lie. He left Cambridge in 1753, went to London, and
disappeared from all public notice until the fame of
his scientific discoveries dragged him into unwilling
notoriety.

Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine 245

There have been many attempts to work out by
hook or by crook what manner of life Cavendish led
before his fame made him a public character, but
all are alike in their total failure. We don't even
know whether he lived in affluence or in poverty.
Both were the same to him. When, through the death
of relatives, he became one of the richest men in
England, his habits changed not a bit. He still lived
and acted as if he had just enough for the simple
minima of life.

Almost the only relics of this period of Cavendish's
life are the laboratory notes which he accumulated
in tremendous quantities. They prove that from the
time he left Cambridge he was hard at work. Meas-
uring, always measuring. He investigated the
chemical reactions of arsenic and weighed carefully
all the ingredients he used. He determined the freez-
ing point of mercury, and developed a thermometer
which would measure this better than any had done
before. He carried on other researches on heat, re-
cording his observations but seldom putting them
together into anything resembling a theory. His first
appearance before the public was when, in 1766, the
Royal Society got hold of his paper on "Factitious
Airs" and published it in the Philosophical Trans-
actions. From then on he was an unwilling celebrity.

This paper contained the first accurate investiga-

046 Crusaders of Chemistry

tion of hydrogen, the element which was to give
Cavendish his chief importance as a chemist. And it
showed what his mind was like. There is no theoriz-
ing, no putting together of observations. Only meas-
urement. Cavendish went about getting his hydrogen
with painful exactness. He found what metals would
yield hydrogen when treated with acids and he found
exactly how much each would yield. An ounce of
zinc gave 356 measures of the gas, an ounce of iron
412, and an ounce of tin 202. These observations
might have grown into the "theory of combining
weights," but Cavendish's mind did not work that
way. He verified his figures and passed on to de-
termine with equal care the specific gravity of the
hydrogen he got. His results were not very accurate,
because the practical difficulties of weighing this
extremely light gas were great. But they were the
best yet made. Having measured his hydrogen, Cav-
endish then measured its inflammability by explod-
ing it with different volumes of air. His results are
expressed in definite figures, but he did not notice
the moisture which resulted. He was looking for one
thing only, the amount of hydrogen which had to be
mixed with the air to make it burn. He found this,
but it wasn't for nearly twenty years that he discov-
ered what product was formed.

In this paper, and all his other papers, Cavendish

H F N KY C AVI- NDI SH

Eldest son of Lord Charles Cavendish, fabulously
wealthy, a hater of women, and possibly the most im-
portant chemist of his time

Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine 047

used the language of the phlogiston theory. Its ter-
minology was widely understood and convenient But
he could hardly be called a partisan of the theory.
Priestley accepted the phlogiston theory and fought
for it with a loyalty seldom lavished on anything but
a religious doctrine. But Cavendish was not inter-
ested in controversy. He made quantities of hydrogen,
measured it, investigated its properties, and let others
worry about the implications of his discoveries. If
you'd asked him which side he took in the phlogiston
controversy the burning scientific question of the
day you'd have got a blank look or no look at all.
He used the phlogistian terminology because it was
convenient, but that was as far as he went. The gas
would weigh the same and act the same whatever he
called it.

It is hopeless to attempt to give a chronological
account of Cavendish's discoveries. He didn't care
what the world thought of his work, and so he took
no pains to get his results in print. Many of his
papers were not published until long after his death,
and many were not written down at all, remaining
a mere mass of figures in his notebooks. Often a dis-
covery of importance would lie untouched in his files
while other men worked hopefully on the same
problem. So few were his contacts with the world
outside his laboratory that he seldom paid the slight-

248 Crusaders of Chemistry

est attention to what his fellow scientists were doing.
Even when he learned by accident that they were
working on a problem he had already solved, he
seldom took the trouble to tell them.

The account of such an isolated life is bound to be
a series of fragments. Cavendish was busy all the
time, but he apparently worked without any end in
view, without any intention of making his work valu-
able to science. He jumped from chemistry to
physics, from mathematics to astronomy, from the
electrical apparatus of the torpedo fish to the ancient
calendar of the Hindus. When a problem ceased to
interest him, he'd drop it. What did he care if the
world was waiting for the solution? That was none
of his business.

A few acquaintances did manage to penetrate to
his laboratory and watch him at work. They all made
the same report, that his success was due to an ex-
traordinary accuracy and a marvelous capacity for
taking pains. His apparatus was clumsy-looking,
without finish or elegance, but its essential part, the
balance or thermometer, had been fussed with until
it was as accurate as human hands could make it.
Every experiment was performed fifty or a hundred
times before the results were averaged. Every bit of
material was tested before it was used. Every dis-
turbing factor was allowed for with painful care.

Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine 249

At length a figure would emerge, a figure of many
decimals. Cavendish's work was over. He turned to
the next experiment. Perhaps he had passed within
an inch of some important law of Nature. He didn't
know or care. Others could generalize. He measured.

The greatest achievement of Cavendish was, of
course, the discovery of the compound nature of
water, which has been discussed in a previous
chapter. But this was only a small part of his work.
He did a great deal with heat, especially its effect
on liquids, and in the course of this research de-
veloped a number of vastly improved thermometers.
He analyzed for the first time the hard waters of the
London wells. He developed the first eudiometer for
measuring the percentage of oxygen in air. His notes
bristle with observations which he jotted down in
passing. In trying to freeze mercury, for instance, he
found that a freezing mixture of nitric acid and
snow would give a lower temperature if the acid
were slightly diluted. He took account of this in
making his mixtures, but it didn't occur to him to
investigate the definite hydrates which we now know
nitric acid and other substances form with water.

Perhaps the most interesting experiment Caven-
dish ever did was his famous feat of weighing the
earth. Here again is illustrated the essentially quan-
titative and non-theoretic nature of his mind. The

250 Crusaders of Chemistry

attempt to weigh the earth was nothing new. Ever
since Newton demonstrated the gravitational rela-
tions between the members of the solar system,
astronomers had yearned for an accurate determina-
tion of the earth's mass, for on this figure depended
most of their calculations. Several methods had been
tried or proposed. There were the "mountain
method," the "tidal method," and finally the "torsion
balance method," which was the one Cavendish de-
cided to use.

By the time he took hold of the problem it had
been discussed at length, and all the theoretical think-
ing-out had been done. Even the apparatus to solve
the problem had been designed by an ingenious
clergyman named Mitchell who had died before he
could try out his idea. Nothing remained but the
measuring, which was just what Cavendish loved.
He attacked the job with a cold emotion which in
another man might have been called enthusiasm.

Mitchell's apparatus for weighing the earth is very
simple in principle. It depends on the fact that the
earth is not the only body which exerts gravitational
force. Every body attracts every other body, the
strength of the attraction depending only on their
mass and the distance between them. Thus if the
attraction between two small bodies at the surface of
the earth can be measured, the mass of the earth can

Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine 251

be derived from this figure. We know the force with
which the earth attracts a body at its surface. This
is the weight of the body. We know the distance be-
tween the earth's surface and its center. The only
remaining unknown factor will be the mass of the
earth, and this can be found by solving a simple
equation.

The apparatus which Cavendish used for measur-
ing this force consisted of a wooden beam suspended
at its center by a fine wire and carrying a small lead
ball on either end. Two large lead balls were placed
in such a way that in attracting the small ones they
tended to turn the beam against the resistance of the
wire's elasticity. The angle through which the beam
was turned could be measured, and the force neces-
sary to twist the wire could be computed mathe-
matically by swinging the beam and timing its
vibrations. The stiffer the wire, the faster it would
swing. The rest was arithmetic.

In theory the problem, once grasped, is very
simple, but the technical difficulties are tremendous.
The force to be measured is so small that it looks
like a decimal point followed by a row of zeros as
long as a bead necklace. The slightest disturbing in-
fluence such as a change of temperature throws the
whole thing out of gear. But this was ideal recreation
for Cavendish. He worked at the problem for years,

252 Crusaders of Chemistry

performed the experiment over and over again, and
finally emerged with the conclusion that the density
of the earth was 548. This result was so accurate
that not until forty years later could the combined
resources of the Royal Astronomical Society find a
better figure.

How did Cavendish live while he was perform-
ing these mighty but unimaginative tours de force?
Who were his friends? What were his amusements?
What were his avocations? The answer is simple.
He had none. We have called him a measuring
machine, and a measuring machine he was. His
life was about as eventful as that of one of
his thermometers. He had no opinions on gen-
eral subjects; he expressed no emotions unless
an all-inclusive dislike of humanity may be called
an emotion. If he had some secret defect or de-
formity which made him avoid his fellow men, he
carried that secret successfully to the grave, leaving
no material for the modern psychological grave rob-
ber to work with.

His favorite residence was a large estate in Clap-
ham, then an outlying suburb of London. The whole
house and grounds were filled with a miscellaneous
collection of instruments ranging from delicate ther-

Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine 253

mometers to a full-sized blacksmith's forge set up in
one of the living rooms. The top floor was an observa-
tory containing a large telescope, and a high platform
built in a clump of stately trees served a similar pur-
pose. Along the halls stood racks of glass vessels and
reagent bottles. A visitor had to step carefully to
avoid knocking over an elaborate microscope or a
carboy of sulphuric acid.

To the educated inhabitants of Clapham Cav-
endish was an eccentric celebrity; to the ignorant he
was a wizard and his house a den of black magic.
Strange smells would drift through the open win-
dows, and dull explosions would waken the neigh-
bors from sleep. The servants were silent, uncom-
municative creatures who seemed to have absorbed
some of the character of their master. The inquisitive
couldn't learn much from them about the daily life
of Cavendish.

But so well known a celebrity can't keep entirely
out of sight His very defenses are a challenge to the
curious. Quite a body of anecdote grew up around
this coldest of human beings.

A man with such a passion for accurate measure-
ment would be apt to arrange his life according to a
schedule. Cavendish did. His daily routine was as
accurate and unvarying as the graduations on one
of his thermometers. He rose by the clock, took his

254 Crusaders of Chemistry

meals by the clock, and retired by the clock. Even his
single recreation, driving in his carriage, was fitted
accurately into this schedule. To the rear wheel he
attached a clumsy wooden instrument called a way-
wiser which counted the revolutions of the wheel and
so measured the distance covered. Cavendish knew
each day exactly how far he intended to drive. He
kept his eyes on the way-wiser. When it registered
half the predetermined distance, he called to the
driver, who turned around and went home by exactly
the same route. The day's recreation was over,
i This passion for regularity extended even to his
clothes. He never owned more than one suit at a
time. The pattern and cloth never varied, and he
knew exactly how long a suit might be expected to
last. When the date for discarding it approached,
he sent for his tailor and ordered another exactly like
it. At the end of his life he was wearing clothes
which, although new. were at least forty years out of
style.

His social contacts were almost zero, but he did
go to meetings of the Royal Society Club and to an
occasional dinner at the house of some learned ac-
quaintance. Sometimes at the sight of an unknown
face he would bolt for the door and be gone before
his host knew what had happened. On even more

Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine 255

rare occasions he would give dinners himself to a
chosen two or three. His style of entertainment was
not lavish. The food never varied a leg of mutton,
nothing more. Once he invited the unprecedented
number of four. His butler asked what he should
serve.

"A leg of mutton, of course/' said Cavendish.

"But that won't be enough for five."

"Two legs then.' 5

His dislike for his fellow men was nothing com-
pared with his loathing for women. There were
female servants in his house, but they had strict
orders to remain where he would not see them. If he
as much as caught sight of one, she lost her job. When
he passed a woman on the street, he looked fixedly
the other way as if she were a Medusa intent on turn-
ing him to stone. When he went to walk, he did so
at night because he had learned that two young
women of the neighborhood had timed his arrival
and used to watch him getting over a stile.

After one of the dinners of the Royal Society Club
the members were standing around the room dis-
cussing the things which philosophers are supposed
to discuss. One of the members happened to go to a
window and notice that a very pretty girl was look-
ing down from the upper story of the house opposite

256 Crusaders of Chemistry

and observing the philosophers with a friendly smile.
At a signal from him the other members crowded
to the window to admire the fair creature who was so
obviously admiring them. Cavendish saw the gather-
ing and, thinking that his learned colleagues must be
looking at the moon or something else equally
worthy, shuffled over to the window. He took one
look, saw the smiling girl, muttered a disgusted
"Pshaw," and hastily retired to the back of the room.

Such a man would not be likely to sit for a portrait,
and Cavendish never did so knowingly. But a por-
trait of him exists nevertheless. A well-known artist
of the time asked Sir Joseph Banks to persuade Cav-
endish to sit for him. Sir Joseph laughed heartily. It
had been tried many times before without success.
But the artist persisted, and finally Banks agreed to
invite him to a dinner at which Cavendish would be
present and seat him where he could sketch him un-
observed. The view wasn't perfect. For a while all
the artist could do was to draw the gray-green coat
and the antique three-cornered hat. At last Caven-
dish turned his head. The artist's pencil worked like
mad. Cavendish turned back again, and the artist
fled to safety before his sketch could be confiscated.

When Cavendish was in early middle age the
deaths of various relatives made him one of the
richest men in England. This was a great trial to

Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine 257

him. He bought all the apparatus he could use, but
this considerable expense didn't make the slightest
dent in his income. Year by year his fortune in-
creased. His bankers managed the money, collected
the interest and rents, and knew better than to bother
him about them. They invested some of the accumu-
lated funds in standard securities, but finally they
could stand it no longer. They had a conference and
decided to send their bravest employee to beard the
lion in his den. The unfortunate man who was given
the dangerous task knocked at Cavendish's door and
asked to see the master of the house.

"You can't see him," said the butler. "He's in his
laboratory."

"But I must see him. It is very important."
"You can't see him. I have orders not to admit any-

one."

"I must see him," said the banker, and pushed past
the door.

He found Cavendish in his laboratory wearing a
tremendous frown.

"Who are you, and what do you want?"

"I was sent by your bankers, and I want to report
that you have an uninvested balance of 65,000
pounds. That is a large sum to leave idle, Mr. Cav-
endish. What shall we do with it?"

"Don't bother me again, or I'll take the money

258 Crusaders of Chemistry

away from you and place it with someone who won't

annoy me."

"Shall we invest it, Mr. Cavendish?"
"Yes, yes. But don't come here again." He slammed

the laboratory door in the banker's face.

Bacon, Paracelsus, Boyle, and Priestley were all
intensely religious, each in his own way, but religion
bothered Cavendish not at all. He couldn't measure
it; he couldn't multiply the Trinity by itself and get
a perfect square. So religion played as small a part
in his life as poetry, love, or any other imponderable.
No one ever heard him refer to God, to Christ, or
to the Bible. He wasn't even anti-religious. He just
didn't care.

When a man is about to die, when he realizes that
he himself is about to become imponderable if any-
thing, his religion is apt to burst into belated bloom.
But not so with Cavendish. At the age of seventy-
nine he decided that the end of his life had come. He
was weak and worn out. The life force had been
steadily failing. Cavendish plotted its descending
curve and computed just when it would touch zero.
He called for his valet.

"Mind what I say. I am going to die. When I am

Henry Cavendish, the Measuring Machine 259

dead, but not until then, go to Lord George Caven-
dish and tell him of the event. Go."

Half an hour later the bell rang again. The valet
answered, and in a weaker voice Cavendish ordered
him to repeat his instructions.

"When you are dead," repeated the valet, "but
not until then, I am to go to Lord George Cavendish
and tell him of the event."

"Right," said Cavendish. "Now go."

The valet retired, and Cavendish turned his face
to the wall. A little later the valet tip-toed back. His
master was dead as he had predicted.

So lived and died the coldest, most unhuman mor-
tal who ever wrote his name large in the history of
science. Small men are sometimes cold, but great ones
very seldom. They need human aspirations and de-
sires to drive them toward achievement. But Caven-
dish was driven by no such spur. He had more wealth
than he could use. He had birth and position. The
respect of his colleagues was the only thing which he
would have had to work for, and this he wanted less
than anything else in the world. What he did in
science was done for his own amusement alone. He
was a measuring machine. His sole interest was to
measure the objects in the material universe around

260 Crusaders of Chemistry

him. He contributed greatly to the advancement of
every science known at the time, but he would have
been just as well pleased if his discoveries had died
with him and his precious notebooks had followed
him to the grave.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, the Grand
Seigneur of Science

CHAPTER IX

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, the Grand
Seigneur of Science

SOME children are born with a silver spoon in
their mouths, some with a gold one. Lavoisier
must have been born with a platinum crucible in his,
for he started rich, became richer, and also became
the most famous chemist of his age an achievement
almost unique in the history of science, for scientific
ability and money-making ability seldom exist to-
gether in the same individual. The practical calcula-
tions of commercialism are very different from the
abstract calculations of science. And besides that,
the scientist seldom wants money badly enough to
pay for it the necessary price in time and effort. The
things he desires money won't buy him.

But Lavoisier lived in France under the Old
Regime, and the social-economic set-up was not at
all like what it is to-day. Almost every opportunity
to make money was directly or indirectly in the
hands of the government. There were monopolies

and concessions. There were pensions and annuities.

263

264 Crusaders of Chemistry

There were direct grants from the crown. There
were a thousand different kinds of graft. And
naturally, since the government was controlled by a
small governing class, these various plums fell into
the laps of the members of this class. Lavoisier was
an aristocrat. He was expected to become rich and
did.

The system of special privilege under the Old
Regime had many and obvious disadvantages. It sup-
ported in unproductive idleness a vast number of
parasites, and it imposed a discouraging burden on
the lower classes, but it had one advantage which
almost made up for its faults. It freed men like La-
voisier from the necessity of developing the self-
ish psychology of commercialism and allowed them
to work for the public welfare if they were so in-
clined. Lavoisier was the shining example of what
special privilege can do for society. He made up for
a dozen silly courtiers strutting like satin-clad pea-
cocks up and down the halls of Versailles.

Lavoisier was born in 1743 at Paris. His family
held no title and owned no lands, but it had risen step
by step during the last hundred years from the
humble rank of postilion in the king's service to the
top of the legal profession at the capital. Lavoisier's
father was Sheriff of the Court of Justice a posi-
tion of dignity and importance. He married the

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 265

heiress, Emilie Punctis, and was in a position to see
that his son got a good start in the world.

In those days sons were apt to follow in the foot-
steps of their fathers, and for several generations the
family profession had been the law. But the elder
Lavoisier soon saw where his son's talents lay and
sent him to the College Mazarin, famous for its
scientific faculty. Here he got the best scientific train-
ing available, which wasn't so very good, and was
ready at the age of nineteen to please his father by
attending the law school. He took his degree in a year
and got his license to practice a year later, but the
inoculation didn't take. No doubt he would have
been a good lawyer, but there were other and vastly
more fascinating things to do in Paris in 1763.

Among the other things there was literature.
Lavoisier was no dry-minded technical man. His in-
terests covered the whole spectrum of life. His first
youthful effort was a play which was to be called
La Nouvelle Heloise. Perhaps he didn't know the
title was not exactly original, or perhaps he was try-
ing to make a play out of Rousseau's famous novel.
The world never learned, for when he'd finished only
the first three acts he became fascinated by the
chemical lectures by Rouelle at the Jardin du Roi
which had captured the imagination of fashionable
Paris.

266 Crusaders of Chemistry

Rouelle does not rank now as a great chemist. His
teachings contained much that was wrong, and his
independent discoveries were negligible. But he must
have been a wonderful lecturer, for in silks and pow-
dered wigs the great people of Paris crowded to
hear him. He dressed like a dancing master in velvet
coat and huge wig, but as soon as he got into the
swing of his lecture, the niceties of dress and man-
ner went by the board. Off would come the coat to lie
forgotten in a corner. The wig would follow, and
little Rouelle would stand in his close-cropped gray
hair amid clouds of evil-smelling smoke demon-
strating to the elite of the capital the mysteries of
combustion and calcination. These lectures became
the fad of the day. All Paris was thrilled by what it
thought was a new insight into the mysterious ways
of Nature. Lavoisier's literary ambitions died a sud-
den death, and he began the first of his long series of
scientific researches.

Lavoisier's first enterprise in science shows de-
termination but not imagination. Perhaps as a new
convert from literature he thought he should learn
scientific discipline. At any rate he set up a number
of barometers in his grandfather's house and re-
corded their readings several times a day. His aunt
and his cousin assisted, and his father bought the in-
struments and arranged for correspondents in various

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 267

provincial cities. The readings were continued for
thirty years, but no use was ever made of the data.
By that time Lavoisier had other things to worry
about.

From this abortive attempt at meteorology La-
voisier passed on to geology and began studying
exhaustively the rocks and strata in the neighbor-
hood of Paris especially the gypsum whose abun-
dance near the city gave plaster-of-Paris its name.
This was what led him into chemistry, for after he'd
mapped the quarries from which the gypsum was
taken he proceeded to find out what made the burnt
gypsum set with water into the hard plaster so useful
in building and the arts.

The experiments with gypsum were successful and
important, but what makes them especially inter-
esting was that Lavoisier in this work was almost
the first chemist to use an entirely quantitative
method. He heated the gypsum, found that the vapor
given off was pure water and that it was ex-
actly equal in weight to the water absorbed by the
plaster when it hardened. He decided that the set-
ting of the plaster was due to a recrystallization and
that it was the water combining into new crystals
with the powdered and burnt gypsum which hard-
ened it into plaster-of-Paris. In his very first chemi-
cal research Lavoisier realized the importance of

268 Crusaders of Chemistry

weight, and it was this practice, which he continued
throughout his career, that was responsible for his
greatest discoveries.

In 1765 the Academy of Sciences offered a prize
for the best system of street lighting, and Lavoisier
jumped at the chance with enthusiasm. One of his
fundamental convictions was that the real function
of science was public service, and he was anxious
to prove that as a scientist he could contribute some-
thing valuable to the public welfare. He went about
it with characteristic, even fanatical thoroughness,
shutting himself for six weeks in a dark room so that
his eyes would become sensitive enough to distinguish
between the effects of various lamps and reflectors.
The report he submitted was a marvel of complete-
ness. He considered every known type of lamp and
candle, every known type of reflector and lamp post.
Since the prize was to be awarded for elegance and
economy as well as for efficiency, Lavoisier drew
dozens of neat designs. His decision that candles
were on the whole more effective and economical
than lamps seems a bit strange to us, but at any rate
he won the prize and received a gold medal from the
king. He was only twenty-two, and already he'd per-
formed the first experiment in quantitative chemistry
and had done the first of a long list of public services.

This triumph gained him so much renown that in

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 269

1768 he was proposed for membership in the
Academy and elected the following year, the
youngest member of that august if somewhat pedan-
tic body. He at once plunged into the work of the
association with an energy and devotion almost
miraculous. During the twenty-five years of his mem-
bership he drew up more than two hundred reports
on subjects ranging from the water supply of the
city to mesmerism and the divining rod. He could
finish an intricate report while his colleagues were
going through the preliminary dinners and discus-
sions.

About this time Lavoisier decided that he'd have
to have more money. Science, as he saw it, wasn't a
mere laboratory job one man surrounded by ap-
paratus and notepaper prying loose the unwilling
secrets of Nature. It was a kingdom and he proposed
to be king. He'd need assistants and secretaries. He'd
need correspondents and field workers. He'd need
artisans to make unheard-of instruments. And he'd
need the friendship of every other scientist in France.
All this would take money, a great deal of money.
Well, why not? The government controlled most of
the money in France. It made a practice of favoring
men of culture and accomplishment. And it didn't
look too closely into the details of finance. Lavoisier
decided to join the Ferme Generale.

270 Crusaders of Chemistry

This was a step which had a profound influence
on his later life, for the Ferme Generale was the best-
hated branch of a most unpopular government. In its
long career of more than four hundred years it had
collected such an accumulation of popular dislike
that by the time of Lavoisier the mere mention of its
name in a public house drew a volley of threats and
curses.

Back in the beginning of the Fourteenth Century
the current king had decided that the finances of
France were rather a bore, not worthy of his time and
attention. So he'd sold the revenues of the king-
dom to a group of bankers and let them worry about
collecting. Whatever they could get above the sum
they paid, they could keep, and if he heard they were
keeping too much, he'd charge a higher price the
next year.

From such naive beginnings developed the vast
system of the Ferme Generale. As France grew, it
grew also. When expensive wars occurred, and they
were always occurring, new taxes were levied and
sold in advance for a lump sum. Monopolies were
granted, such as salt and tobacco, and sold each
year. Customs barriers were erected between the
provinces, between each city and the surrounding
country, and every turnip or cabbage had to pay
tribute to the Ferme Generale.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 271

Each year the Ferme had to pay a higher price
for its privileges, and each year it had to squeeze the
people a little harder if it hoped to clear expenses.
By 1768, the year Lavoisier entered the corporation,
the country was nearly desperate. Whole regions
were in chronic revolt. Smuggling was on a vast
scale. The Ferme maintained a standing army of its
own to protect its tax collectors from violence. When
the common people passed its headquarters in Paris,
they spat and swore. All the hatred of France for its
rotten government was concentrated on the grasping
financiers who collected the revenue.

Lavoisier entered this labyrinth of extortion and
corruption with wide-open eyes and the best of in-
tentions. The system was fundamentally bad, but it
was all France had. It would have to be modified
gradually if at all. Lavoisier resolved that his de-
partment at least would be run with honesty and
efficiency. Of course he expected to make a good deal
of money, but that was the psychology of the Old
Regime, which regarded the government as a device
for supporting the upper class. But what he did
would be done in a nice way, with consideration for
others as well as for himself.

The method of joining the Ferme was to buy a
share of the total revenue from the fermier general
for a lump sum which the fermier general paid over

272 Crusaders of Chemistry

to the king. Lavoisier bought a third of a share for
520,000 livres and received the privilege of collecting
the customs in certain western provinces. He
plunged into the work with tremendous energy, not
delegating the duties to subordinates as many of the
other shareholders did. He even managed to com-
bine the work with his constant scientific activities,
filling the records of his business trips to the west
of France with observations of mineral deposits and
soil characteristics as well as with financial data. He
reminded himself that all this money making was
only a means to an end. He didn't forget that his real
object was public service through scientific work un-
hampered by lack of financial means.

His colleagues in the Academy of Sciences looked
on his new enterprise with a mixture of disapproval
and envy. Some of them saw the catastrophe that was
coming in 1789 and were sorry to see one of their
number connected with the odious Ferme. Others
resented the ease with which a man of capital and
influence could increase his already ample fortune.
They considered drawing up a formal protest, but
thought better of it. The geometrician Fontaine re-
marked that Lavoisier's famous dinners would have
more courses than ever, and the others consoled
themselves with the thought that the more important

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 273

Lavoisier became in the government, the more favors
the Academy might expect to receive from it.

It soon became clear that Lavoisier's business in-
terests were not going to interfere with his scien-
tific work. Each minute of his day was accounted for,
and science got its full share. From six to nine in
the morning he worked in his laboratory, and from
seven to ten in the evening. He attended every meet-
ing of the Academy and wrote numerous reports. A
tremendous correspondence kept a corps of secre-
taries busy. One whole day a week was devoted to
experiments which demanded continuous attention.
The Ferme Generate had to take the time left over.

The money which came to Lavoisier from the
Ferme and the energy with which he pushed his re-
search made his laboratory a clearing house for
scientific information of every kind. All problems
which could not be solved because of the expense
were referred to him, and his apparatus and equip-
ment were at the disposal of every scientist who had
none of his own. Problems which had remained un-
solved for years were polished off in no time. The
members of the Academy decided that while the
Ferme remained the ranking evil in the government
of France, it had for once done the public a service
by providing Lavoisier with funds.

An amazing amount of work was performed in

274 Crusaders of Chemistry

Lavoisier's laboratory. Perhaps the first important
accomplishment was the proof that water is not
transmuted into earth by boiling, but others followed
thick and fast. An experiment which had remained
long undone because of expense was the proof that
diamonds are made of carbon like ordinary charcoal
and will burn to carbon dioxide if heated long
enough. The little matter of destroying a number of
costly diamonds did not stop Lavoisier for a mo-
ment. He heated them in all sorts of containers and
proved that they eventually disappeared, leaving be-
hind a gas which clouded lime water just as the gas
from charcoal did.

By this time it was 1770 and Lavoisier already had
a general idea of what his life work would be. It was
no less than the destruction of the then dominant
phlogiston theory. The root of Lavoisier's doubts
about this theory was the fact that metals and other
substances on combustion in air gain weight rather
than lose it. To the phlogistians this seemed perfectly
all right. Phlogiston, they believed, weighed less
than nothing, and so of course a substance which
gave it off gained weight in the process. But to
Lavoisier this seemed an unwarrantable assumption.
Nowhere else in Nature had he been able to find
an example of negative weight, and his carefully
quantitative methods had proved to him that what-

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 275

ever transformations matter may pass through, it
always remains exactly as heavy as before.

Very completely Lavoisier realized that such a
fundamental problem could not be solved offhand.
He would have to build up his new theory from the
bottom, repeating all the famous experiments of the
past, and checking carefully all the observations on
which the prevailing theories rested. Thanks to the
Ferme Generale, he was equipped for this tre-
mendous task. He set to work.

Unlike Priestley, who never planned his work
carefully, or Cavendish, who considered science
merely an absorbing sport, Lavoisier went about his
task with a definite campaign mapped out. Each new
discovery, as soon as made, would fit in somewhere.
With the single exception of Boyle, who worked
along somewhat the same lines, Lavoisier was the
first chemist to see the problem as a whole. He re-
solved that in his work there would be no inspired
theories based on shaky facts, and no blind groping
after some tremendous but vague discovery. Nature,
he knew, was a vast and intricate machine whose in-
dividual parts moved according to a set of definite
laws. If he started with something absolutely sure
and absolutely definite and formed no conclusion
which wasn't in accordance with all the facts, he
knew he couldn't go wrong.

276 Crusaders of Chemistry

The bedrock law on which Lavoisier proposed to
build his theory was the doctrine of the conservation
of matter. This law had long been used by the more
clear-headed chemists, but never sufficiently fortified
with proofs. The alchemical notion that the elements
could be transmuted into one another still persisted,
and transmutation offered a safe refuge for the sup-
porters of phlogiston who found themselves too
hard-pressed. When confronted with some observa-
tion which did not fit into their theory, they would
smile pleasantly and announce that the discrepancy
of weight or material was accounted for by trans-
mutation of one element into another.

The law of the conservation of matter can't be
proved by positive means. The best we can do is
demonstrate that it applies to each specific case. This
was what Lavoisier did in his famous experiment of
boiling water for a hundred and one days and prov-
ing that the solid matter left behind on evaporation
came from the glass vessel, not from transmutation
of water into earth. In this way he destroyed the pet
proof of the transmutation chemists. He announced
that as soon as they produced another, he'd destroy
that too. No other was brought forward.

The next step was to repeat the famous experi-
ments on which the phlogistians had built their
theory. Lavoisier heated metals in air and weighed

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 277

carefully both the metal and the oxide produced by
calcination. He even went further and burned sul-
phur and phosphorus, collecting their combustion
products and finding that in each case they weighed
more than the unburned substance. It would seem an
obvious conclusion to draw from this that some-
thing had been absorbed from the air used in com-
bustion, but it wasn't as simple as we think it is now.
The Eighteenth Century chemists had no reason to
think that air was not a simple substance. It had
always been regarded as such. Certainly no one had
found a kind of air which was different from any
other kind. Its properties all over the world were
remarkably uniform, the slight variations being at-
tributed quite correctly to the presence of water
vapor. "And," said the phlogistians, "no matter how
much metal or phosphorus you use, you can't absorb
more than a fifth of a given quantity of air. How
much more rational it is to say that the air remains
free and combines with something from the metal,
losing part of its volume in the process?"

Lavoisier was fully aware of this objection. At
every point he was met by the question, "If air is
absorbed, why isn't it all absorbed?" For the present
he had nothing to answer. He hadn't been able to
separate the air into active and non-active parts.
We'll leave him in this dilemma and consider his

278 Crusaders of Chemistry

other activities, one of which brought him the in-
formation his laboratory refused to provide.

All this time his business affairs had been going
very well. Such had been his success with the tobacco
monopoly, the customs, and a subsequent venture in
salt, that the government entrusted him with the ex-
tremely important problem of saltpeter supply and
made him regisseur des poudres. In Eighteenth Cen-
tury warfare explosives were not used to the extent
they are now, but gunpowder was, if possible, even
more essential to the prosecution of successful war.
It was practically the only munition of which an
army had to have an unfailing supply. Weapons were
simple and almost indestructible. Food could be col-
lected from the surrounding country. An army didn't
need gasoline, poison gas, or the thousand necessary
supplies of modern warfare. But gunpowder it had
to have, and this depended on the supply of salt-
peter.

In the Eighteenth Century saltpeter was still
"digged out of the bowels of the harmless earth," as
Hotspur says in Henry the Fourth, but the process
was not very satisfactory. It took a lot of digging and
produced very little saltpeter. Lavoisier for the first
time attacked the problem as a chemist, deciding
that saltpeter came from decayed animal matter and
developing methods for making it out of sewage,

LAVOISIER AND HIS WIFE

One of the greatest of all French scientists, Lavoisier
was condemned to death during the French Revolu-
tion with the words, "The Republic has no need for
learned men "

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 279

manure, and slaughter-house refuse instead of ex-
tracting it from the earth of barnyards and long-
cultivated fields. He also found that the manufac-
turers had been treating it with leached wood ashes
which contained very little of the necessary potas-
sium. These two reforms and the economies effected
by a drastic reorganization of the financial side of
the business secured for France a much better and
cheaper supply of gunpowder and raised Lavoisier
into high favor with the government.

One of the reasons why Lavoisier had decided to
go into financial politics was that he intended to de-
velop a meeting place for all the natural philosophers
of France and Europe. This would require both
money and position. After he became controller of
munitions such a center was secured, for he was given
a residence and headquarters in the Little Arsenal
on the Rue de la Cerisaie. Here he set up a well-
equipped laboratory and issued standing invitations
to all scientists to come and visit him when they felt
so inclined. "The secrets of Nature," said Lavoisier,
"can't be dragged into the light by one man. We
must have the cooperation and the united efforts of
many minds." He intended to meet and talk with
every important philosopher. His dinners at the
Little Arsenal became famous all over Europe.

280 Crusaders of Chemistry

At one of these dinners in 1774 Lavoisier met
Priestley and heard from him an account of his dis-
covery of oxygen. Priestley, faithful as always to the
phlogiston theory, insisted on considering his gas
mere dephlogisticated air, but Lavoisier knew bet-
ter. It was just the information he'd been waiting
for. It justified the expense of many a dinner.

This was a great step toward the completion of
Lavoisier's new theory of chemistry. Although
Priestley never admitted it, he had solved the prob-
lem which had blocked Lavoisier's campaign against
phlogiston. It only needed a little careful labora-
tory work for Lavoisier to prove that a metal, mer-
cury in this case, could take from the air the active
gas responsible for combustion, leaving behind the
inactive part which we now call nitrogen.

Now that this difficulty had been cleared up,
Lavoisier could demolish the next stronghold of
phlogiston, the regeneration of a metal from its calx
by heating with powdered charcoal. It had long been
known that when charcoal was burned in air it gave
off a gas which clouded lime water. Lavoisier reas-
oned that if he should find such a gas in the vessel
after heating a calx with charcoal, he could prove
that the charcoal merely took from the calx the
"active air" which the metal of the calx had in its
turn extracted from the atmosphere. This proved to

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 281

be the case, and Lavoisier had won another victory.
In all his scientific work Lavoisier was careful
not to draw rash conclusions. "Time will tell," he
said in one of his papers on combustion. "It is the
fate of those who engage in physical and chemical
experiments to see a new step to take as soon as the
first has been taken. The road which has been pre-
sented to them appears to extend in proportion as
they travel it." But after a triumph such as the
demonstration that charcoal does not restore phlogis-
ton to a calx, it was only human to generalize a bit.
Lavoisier observed that many products of combus-
tion may be dissolved in water to form acids. For
once in his life he ran a little ahead of his facts and
concluded that Priestley's dephlogisticated air was
the "acid principle." So sure was he of this that he
named it oxygen, the acid former. And he paid for
his rashness by missing one of the greatest discoveries
of the age, the synthesis of water. He burned inflam-
mable air in oxygen in hopes of finding an acid like
those formed by burning sulphur or phosphorus. He
found no acid, and the small amount of moisture
which was formed was concealed by the water in
which he tried to collect the presumably gaseous acid.
It wasn't until several years later that he heard of
the work of Cavendish and learned what really had
happened in his combustion tube.

282 Crusaders of Chemistry

By the time Lavoisier was thirty-five he was al-
ready a great figure in the social and political as well
as the scientific affairs of France. If he had been a
scientific hermit like Cavendish hiding in a deep bur-
row of research, he might have missed the feeling
of impending calamity that hung over his country.
But he was intimately in touch with affairs. Through
the Ferme Generate he was practically a member of
the government. And he knew that if something dras-
tic weren't done, and quickly, there'd be an explosion
such as France hadn't seen since the days of the
Jacquerie.

Of course the fundamental trouble was the anti-
quated government and the privileges which it had
granted for centuries to the parasite nobles and the
decadent Church. It was a long story beginning far
back in the Middle Ages. A tax here, a monopoly
there. A grant of land to a noble, a grant of a toll-
bridge franchise to an abbot. Reforms were at-
tempted but never carried out, for they had to be-
gin by abolishing some of the privileges of the nobles
and clergy, and these classes through their influence
with the king were always strong enough to defeat
the reform.

On top of these abuses came the crushing burden
of an extravagant court and almost constant war-

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 283

fare. Each year the Ferme Generale was called on
to provide more money, and each year it had to apply
more pressure to the wretched peasants who were the
ultimate source of supply. But the money was never
enough. The king and his corrupt favorites always
spent more than came in, and vast debts accumulated
which were repudiated from time to time to the
ruin of the bankers who'd made loans to the crown.

One of the most alarming signs of trouble ahead
was the desperation and sullen defiance of the peas-
ants. Most of them were tenants on land belonging
to the nobles or the Church, and they'd learned by
bitter experience that the more they raised the more
would be taken away by the landlord and the tax
collector. If they improved the fertility of their
fields by sound farming methods, their rent would
be increased in proportion. So they lived from hand
to mouth in grumbling hopelessness. They knew
they'd be allowed just enough to keep body and soul
together. They didn't intend to produce a surplus
for the use of their oppressors.

Ever since Lavoisier had first joined the Ferme
Generale, he had realized that things were in a pretty
bad way. He had been able to put through a few
minor reforms, notably in the administration of the
tobacco and saltpeter monopolies, but in 1778 he em-

284 Crusaders of Chemistry

barked on a more far-reaching experiment. He
bought the large estate of Frechines near Blois to
develop into a model farm. He had observed during
his travels about the country that almost nowhere
was the land producing as much as it would if prop-
erly cultivated, and he thought he knew the reason
why. The peasants were not stupid decidedly not.
They were merely ignorant and discouraged
ignorant because no one had taken the trouble to
give them up-to-date information, and discouraged
because they knew that if they improved their
methods, the resulting benefits would immediately be
taken from them.

Lavoisier was confident that if the peasants knew
that their efforts would be well rewarded they would
improve their own condition and that of the gov-
ernment which depended on them. But to argue along
this line in government circles was useless. To the
nobles and clergy who owned the land and the tax
farmers who collected the revenue, the peasant was
a beast of burden to be loaded with as much as he
could carry. That he would carry more if less heavily
loaded was a parodox beyond the comprehension of
the blind or cynical high officials. So Lavoisier de-
cided to start at the other end.

The first thing he did at Frechines was to assure
his peasants that they would receive the benefits of

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 285

any improvements they made. He promised not to
raise their rents as the productivity of their fields
increased, and he promised to use his position in the
Ferme Generale to protect them from the rapacity
of the tax collectors. If they followed his advice
about crop rotation and fertilization, they'd raise
better crops and these would belong to them alone.
For his pay he'd take the chance to show the govern-
ment what could be accomplished by treating them
justly.

It was slow work. Although Lavoisier held only a
very minor title, he was an aristocrat in the eyes of
his peasants, and they looked on all aristocrats with
well-founded suspicion. It was hard to convince them
that he was sincere and doubly hard to make them
adopt farming methods which were strange and new.
To gain their confidence, Lavoisier started with small
plots of the poorest land, improving them gradually
until they equaled and surpassed the best land on the
estate. As he grew in favor with his people, he intro-
duced more reforms. He was among the first to plant
potatoes. He imported cattle from Spain and milch
cows from Chanteloup. He distributed improved
seed. Soon the wheat yield had doubled and the num-
ber of cattle had multiplied by five. The peasants
were prosperous and grateful. To them Lavoisier was
a father, almost a saint. Each trip he made to his

286 Crusaders of Chemistry

estate sent him back to Paris more thankful that
he'd tried the experiment.

"Such an investment [said he] does not
present the brilliant speculation of stock buying
or gambling in the public bills-of-exchange, but
neither is it accompanied with the same risks and
the same reverses. One's success causes no tears ;
on the contrary it is attended by the blessings of
the poor. An intelligent proprietor cannot make
his farm increase in value with improvements
without spreading about him comfort and hap-
piness. A rich and abundant vegetation, a numer-
ous population, a picture of prosperity, these
are the rewards for his pains."

Sometimes Madame Lavoisier went to the farm
to watch her husband among his people.

"One should see him [she wrote] in that
house in the society of the villagers, as mag-
istrate of the peace reestablishing harmony be-
tween neighbors, giving an example of all the
patriarchal virtues, caring for the sick not
merely with money but by his visits and per-
sonal attentions, encouraging them to be patient
and hopeful, and founding a school for the gen-
eration which, before his coming, was growing
up without culture."

Lavoisier's success in scientific farming was so
great that in 1785 he was put in charge of a com-

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 287

mittee on agriculture which the government was
finally persuaded to appoint. It had large powers
over such things as flax manufacture and the duties on
agricultural products, but as soon as it made any
real attempts to improve the condition of the peas-
ants it ran head on against the ancient privileges of
nobility and clergy, against the forced labor laws
inherited from feudal times, against the gabelle, the
faille,. and the corvee. Lavoisier saw that the trouble
lay deeper than any committee on agriculture could
hope to reach.

In a report to the Controller General he put his
finger on the basic fault of his country's despotic and
antiquated government :

"We know [he wrote] that the true end of a
government should be to increase the sum of en-
joyment, happiness, and well-being of all indi-
viduals. If commerce has been more encour-
aged, more protected than agriculture, it is
because the profession of the merchant is prac-
tised by a class of citizens of a more awakened
order who know how to talk and write, who
live in cities, who make there a group whose
voice is easily heard. The unfortunate farmer
groans in his thatched cottage; he has neither
representative nor defender, and his interests
have not been counted of any value in the dis-

288 Crusaders of Chemistry

tribution which has been made of departments
for the administration of the kingdom."

Lavoisier was not the man to stop with generaliza-
tions. He went on to list in detail all the burdens
which the peasant had to bear the ecclesiastical
levies, the unjust and often capricious taxation, the
forced labor, and the compulsory use of the land-
lord's grist mill. All these would have to be abol-
ished if the peasants were to be restored to prosperity.

By this time it was 1788, and conditions had
become so bad that the government was thoroughly
alarmed. Almost daily reports of disorder reached
the capital. Sometimes it was the peasants rebelling
against their feudal lords, sometimes a manor house
set on fire in the night, sometimes a tax collector
found murdered by the roadside, sometimes a mob
of a provincial city welling out of the slums to burn
and destroy. At Paris, Necker, the able Minister of
Finance, was almost at his wit's end. Every reform
move he made was blocked by the parasites cluster-
ing around the throne. Every change in administra-
tion was opposed by some selfish interest which bene-
fited by things as they were. And the king played with
his locksmith tools, hardly conscious that there was
trouble.

Finally Necker decided that if he couldn't ac-

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 289

complish anything with the court, he could at least
set up governing bodies which would function with
more justice and energy. As an experiment in de-
centralization, he called the Provincial Assembly of
Orleans, which consisted of twenty-five members ap-
pointed by the king and an equal number elected by
the appointees. Lavoisier was technically a noble-
man, but he was appointed as a commoner to repre-
sent the district of Romorantin near his model farm.
At the first session in September he acted as secre-
tary; at the second in November his influence was
dominant.

In spite of the fact that it was not elective but
appointed by the king, the assembly of Orleans was
remarkably liberal. The reforms it proposed sound
advanced even in the Twentieth Century. Besides
an efficient system for peasant education, Lavoisier
worked out a scheme of insurance designed to assure
the peasant of a secure old age if he cultivated his
land effectively during his active period. He made
strenuous efforts to abolish forced labor and feudal
dues and submitted a report on general taxation. If
the Provincial Assembly of Orleans inspired by La-
voisier had been allowed to finish its work, the
Revolution might never have occurred. But it was
too late. The central government was bankrupt.
Revolts were threatening in every corner of the king-

290 Crusaders of Chemistry

dom. Necker in desperation decided to call the
Estates General for the first time in 175 years. The
Fall of the Bastille was only a few weeks ahead. Few
realized it, but the Revolution had already begun.

The calling of the Estates General was the cause
of universal rejoicing. Full of confidence and hope,
Lavoisier went to Paris to join it as the delegate
from Blois. "Now," he thought, "we have all the
nation gathered together in assembly. We can wipe
the slate clean and start afresh with justice for every-
one from peasant to king." But it wasn't so simple.
Not everyone was as public-spirited as Lavoisier.
The great nobles, the higher clergy, and the bankers
who had fattened on the graft of the Ferme Generale
were not going to give up their privileges without a
struggle. The Estates might meet, but they would find
plenty of obstacles in their way.

The French Revolution was far from a simple
thing. It didn't take place in a day or a year. As the
power slipped from the paralytic hand of the king
and favorites, each other class made an attempt to
secure it. First the Liberal nobles; then the bour-
geoisie, then the representatives of the people, and
finally the mob from the gutters of Paris who ruled
with ignorant ferocity, striking down friend and foe
alike. For a while it looked as if the Estates General
led by enlightened noblemen like Lafayette and

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 291

Mirabeau would keep the upper hand, but trouble
soon developed. In the first place there was a good
deal of confusion about the relative powers of the
three estates, the nobles, clergy, and commons. If
they sat as separate houses each with a veto power
over the acts of the other, the privileged classes which
controlled two of them would be able to block all re-
forms. Whereas, if they sat together, the commons
who equaled in numbers both the other houses to-
gether would be able with the aid of Liberal nobles
and clergymen to out-vote their reactionary oppo-
nents. There was a long wrangle with charges and
counter-charges until finally the king ordered the
reluctant upper houses to sit with the commons.

This was a victory for the Liberals, but their re-
joicing was short, for the Parisian mob grew more
and more threatening. The government began to
concentrate what troops it could gather near the
capital. Paris defied them. Barricades were built over
night. And finally on July 14, 1789, the first of many
storms broke. On a rumor that the king was going to
dissolve the Assembly, the mob of Paris broke loose
and destroyed the ancient prison of the Bastille, the
symbol of royal tyranny. Wholly unchecked by royal
or other authority, it tore through the city seizing
all aristocrats it could lay its hands on and hanging
them to the lamp posts Lavoisier's lamp posts, for

292 Crusaders of Chemistry

it was only some twenty years since he had designed
them and they were made to last. July i4th was a
taste of what was coming. The great aristocrats began
to emigrate to foreign countries. Only the foolish and
the idealistic stayed. Among the latter was Lavoisier,
whose conscience wouldn't let him desert the country
he'd served so long and so well.

One of the surprising things about the French
Revolution was the slowness 'with which it took
place. After July i4th the Parisian mob was always a
threatening cloud in the background and in many of
the provinces the peasants had risen and reduced
their neighborhood to anarchy. But still the saner
leaders of the Estates clung to hope and continued
their deliberations at Versailles. Concession after
concession they wrung from the terrified upper
classes. Feudal dues were renounced. Titles were
abolished. The rights of man were proclaimed, and
an admirable constitution was adopted. But things
had gone too far. The Parisian mob broke loose again
and again, each time with greater ferocity. Dema-
gogues rose from the gutters to take the places of the
moderate leaders who were trying to avert the catas-
trophe. Most of the aristocrats had fled, but Lavoisier
stayed on, making no attempt to save his skin. He
had done much to start the Revolution. He felt that
he should see it through.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 293

In all the confusion and bloodshed of those terrible
years there was one place where he could find peace
and contentment. This was the Little Arsenal where
his laboratory was still in working order. The Bir-
mingham mob had destroyed Priestley's apparatus,
but the mob of Paris was of a different temper. It did
not attack science as such. So in his laboratory La-
voisier could find the peace he needed to finish his
work.

Perhaps he saw the end drawing near. At any rate
he now began to gather his discoveries into a com-
plete theory of chemistry. He resolved that if the
world he knew should fall into chaos, he would leave
at least one useful legacy for future generations.
This was his famous Tralte element air e de chimie,
the first modern textbook of chemistry. It was the
death warrant of the phlogiston theory. Carefully,
completely, and accurately, Lavoisier explained his
new conceptions of chemical law. He demonstrated
with convincing experiments how the air contains
oxygen and nitrogen, how the oxygen combines with
a burning substance, how water contains oxygen
and hydrogen, how all these reactions take place
according to exact laws, and how this proves that
chemistry is a definite mathematical science.

The Traiie was at once hailed as the most im-
portant contribution to chemistry ever published.

294 Crusaders of Chemistry

The members of the Academy, those who hadn't
fled the country, were unanimous. Foreign scientists
wrote to Lavoisier in glowing terms. It was trans-
lated at once into English, German, Spanish, and
Italian. All Europe proclaimed it a masterpiece, a
great forward step toward the scientific age to come.
It was a strange time to publish a masterpiece, and
to Lavoisier sitting in his laboratory at the Little
Arsenal the chorus of praise must have sounded
rather like a last tribute. It didn't take much pene-
tration to tell him that his career was nearly over.
Already he knew what it was like to have a mob
howling for his blood. To the scientists of Europe
he was Lavoisier the chemist, but to the mob he was
Lavoisier of the Ferme Generate, and anyone who
had ever been connected with the hated Ferme was
marked down on the mob's darkest blacklist. As early
as 1789 he got a hint of how the populace felt to-
ward him. There'd been an explosion in one of his
powder mills in which two men were killed. This
had been given great publicity by the enemies of the
munitions administrators, but the feeling against
them did not come to a head until August 6th when
Lavoisier decided to move some of the powder from
the crowded arsenal to storehouses at Rouen and
Metz. The rumor spread that he was selling it to
the enemy, and at once the mob was at his door. The

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 295

riot was suppressed, but Lavoisier knew that his
troubles were not over.

One of the alarming signs of the course events
were taking was the rise to influence of Marat, the
bloodthirsty leader of the Paris slums. To Marat rev-
olution did not mean an orderly reform of govern-
ment or an abolition of abuses. He rejected such mild
measures as inconclusive. All aristocrats, all rich
men, all army officers, all officials of the Old Regime
must be destroyed, he thought, before liberty could
be attained. In his paper, "The Friend of the
People," he preached murder, mutiny, and rape. He
attended the National Assembly with a brace of pis-
tols at his belt and marched at the head of every
mob which promised blood for him to enjoy.

Now Marat had started his career as a medical
student, but finding the course of study too strenu-
ous, had taken a short cut and begun selling quack
medicines on the streets of Paris. He also rather
fancied himself as a chemist and published a treatise
on fire which he announced had been praised by the
Academy of Science. The Academy hadn't even seen
it, far less praised it. Lavoisier pointed out several
glaring errors in the book and dismissed it in a few
disdainful words, thus gaining the eternal hatred of
Marat, who never forgot an enemy.

More than twenty years had passed since this oc-

296 Crusaders of Chemistry

curred. Lavoisier had forgotten all about it, but
Marat had not. He bided his time until 1791. Then
he launched a savage attack on Lavoisier :

"I denounce this Corypheus of the Charla-
tans, Sieur Lavoisier, son of a land-grabber,
chemical apprentice, pupil of the Genevese
stock-jobber, fermier-general, regisseur of pow-
der and saltpeter, administrator of the Discount
Bank, secretary of the king, member of the
Academy of Science. Would to heaven that he
had been strung to the lamp post on August 6th.
The electors of La Culture would then not have
to blush for having nominated him."

Nor was this all. As a member of the Ferme
Generate he was attacked in the journals, in the all-
powerful political clubs, and in the National As-
sembly itself. One by one his offices were taken from
him. He was expelled from the Assembly. He was
deposed as regisseur des poudres. He was even driven
from the Commission of Weights and Measures. By
this time Lavoisier had long since given up any hope
of saving his own skin. He knew he was already as
good as dead. But when the revolutionary extremists
attacked his beloved Academy of Science he made
one last fight with his old vigor.

The revolutionists hated the Academy for the
simple reason that it was a royal institution, but it

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 297

was hard to find any specific charges against its mem-
bers. They were mostly elderly scientists who had
taken no part in public affairs. But when the Revolu-
tion had reached this stage, specific charges were not
needed. The "f riends of the people" had invented the
blanket crime of "incivism" to cover all such cases.
It meant anything and everything from mere posses-
sion of property to high treason. In 1792 the
Assembly demanded that the Academy expel all "in-
civic" members. Lavoisier and the other officers of
the society of course protested that the Academy had
nothing to do with the political opinions of its mem-
bers. They managed to stave off the blow until the
summer of 1793, when the Academy was finally
abolished.

Lavoisier had hoped to save the Academy. He had
no hope of saving himself. The Year of the Terror
was approaching, and he was forever stigmatized as
having belonged to the hated Ferme Generate. But
to the end he worked as he had worked all his life,
improving the manufacture of saltpeter, even assist-
ing the Commission of Weights and Measures from
which he had been expelled. Each day he expected
to be his last. His enemy Marat had died under the
dagger of Charlotte Corday, but he had plenty of
others. He had been a fermier. That was enough.

On November 24, 1793, ^ e Assembly decreed the

298 Crusaders of Chemistry

arrest of all members of the Ferme Generale who had
signed the leases of David, De Salzard, and De
Meyer. Among these was Lavoisier. He was taken to
the convent of Port-Royal, then used as a prison, to
await the forgone conclusion of his trial.

On the fifth of May the prisoners were ordered to
appear before the revolutionary tribunal. This was
the end. The tribunal had an almost hundred per cent
perfect record. To be sent before it was the equiva-
lent of a death sentence. The specific charge against
Lavoisier was adulteration of the people's tobacco,
but this was only mentioned in passing. A final ap-
peal was made for him. His patriotic services were
recounted the improved manufacture of gun-
powder which had made possible the Republic's vic-
tories, the work for the peasants of Frechines, the
numberless reports on reordering the kingdom's
economic system, his great accomplishments in
science. But it was useless. The terrible Coffinhals
presided and he had no interest in such matters. He
hardly listened to the appeal. When the speech came
to an end, he looked up and pronounced the final
words :

"The Republic has no need for learned men. Let
Justice take its course."

The next day the prisoners were led to the Place
de la Revolution, guillotined without ceremony, and

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier 299

their bodies thrown into an unmarked grave in the
cemetery of Madeleine. France had executed its
most distinguished scientist. As one of the witnesses
said the next day, "It took only a moment to cut off
that head. It will take a hundred years to produce
another like it."

Lavoisier's execution was the work of the Reign
of Terror at its height. After a few more bloody
weeks France awoke as if from a nightmare. Robes-
pierre followed his victims to the scaffold and with
him went Coffinhals and a hundred others. The
Terror was over. Even before the reaction was fully
under way, the leaders of popular opinion realized
the mistake they had made. Protests poured in from
all over France, all over Europe, for Lavoisier was
revered by every lover of knowledge. Even the
people, now that sanity had returned, remembered
his unselfish work at Frechines, his devotion to the
public good. Only a few months after his death, the
National Assembly voted to restore his confiscated
property to his widow, and one of his bitterest per-
secutors, Fourcroy, thought it best to compose an
elaborate eloge to his memory.

Lavoisier died at the height of his productive
period, but if on the way to the scaffold he looked
back over his career, he could congratulate himself
on having finished at least one job. He'd found the

300 Crusaders of Chemistry

science of chemistry in utter confusion, wandering in
a labyrinth of blind alleys, following the false god
phlogiston. He left it with a clear road to follow. Be-
fore Lavoisier, the chemist was a theorist arguing
vaguely about reactions he did not understand. After
Lavoisier he was a searcher for the definite laws of
Nature. Lavoisier had shown the way.

The Harvest of Peaceful Middle Age

304 Crusaders of Chemistry

Lavoisier died in 1794, Priestley in 1804, and Cav-
endish in 1 8 10. With their passing chemistry may be
said to have come of age. Its youthful battles were
over. The chemists of the Nineteenth Century did
not have to contend with theology or the other intel-
lectual legacies of the Middle Ages. The attitude of
the Nineteenth Century toward science was sub-
stantially the attitude of the present. The scientists
were honored by the public, subsidized by the state,
and let alone by the Church. They could work in
peace to build up the wonderful if somewhat ter-
rifying thing we call modern civilization.

But with the struggle went some of the glory also.
The later chemists were not enemies of society like
Roger Bacon, outcasts like Paracelsus, or reluctant
inconoclasts like Boyle and Priestley, half afraid of
what they were starting. They did not have to push
boldly out into the unknown. Their road had plenty
of sign posts. Lavoisier had put them there. All that
the Nineteenth Century chemists had to do was to
follow his directions and they couldn't go wrong.

After Lavoisier the course of true chemistry ran
remarkably smoothly. Discoveries came thick and
fast like the olives from a bottle when the first re-
luctant one has been dislodged. Men knew how the
trick was done, and they proceeded to do it. There

The Harvest of Peaceful Middle Age 305

were many workers now instead of only a handful
so many that the credit for each discovery has to be
divided between a dozen claimants. And as the
science grew, it divided into special branches. There
were no more old-fashioned natural philosophers
who covered the whole field of knowledge. The
breadth of interest which made the early chemists so
fascinating was no longer possible in a world grown
many-sided and complicated. Lavoisier touched
every human concern from politics to theoretical
chemistry, but after his death this could no longer
be done. The field was too large. Each specialty had
its corps of devoted workers. Dalton, Gay-Lussac,
Avogadro, and Kekule discovered the molecule and
the laws which govern its formation. Davy, Fara-
day, and Arrhenius determined the part which elec-
tricity plays in chemical reaction. Liebig, Wohler,
Dumas, and Kopp explored the labyrinth of organic
chemistry. The scientific age had begun in earnest.
Instead of a few courageous pioneers working against
violent opposition to establish the fundamental laws,
a host of specialists, secure in the universities and
state-subsidized laboratories, gathered the harvest
the pioneers had sown.

At the present time chemistry can hardly be called
"pure" science. It is largely technology the investi-

306 Crusaders of Chemistry

gation of specific problems with a practical object in
view. New dyes, new plastics, new finishes these
are the concerns of the modern laboratory. The
chemical engineer touches every human activity from
farming to warfare, and civilization could not con-
tinue without him. But it's a long way from the
pioneers with their wide-ranging hopes and plans to
the modern chemist trying to make an acceptable
soap out of some evil-smelling oil from the tropics.
If we want to find men like Boyle and Lavoisier
whose thoughts reach out into the unknown regions
beyond present knowledge, we have to leave chem-
istry and follow the frontier of science into physics,
mathematics, biology, and psychology. Here we'll
find unsolved problems. Hints of intellectual revolu-
tions to come which terrify the modern mind as the
first glimpses of science terrified the bishops of
Charles the Second. It is still too early to judge, but
Einstein may overthrow the conventional physics as
completely as Lavoisier overthrew phlogistohism.
Relativity, the quantum theory, and the startling de-
velopments of biology and psychology may cause a
modification of human life as far-reaching as the
industrial revolution which followed the develop-
ment of Eighteenth Century science. We are still
living on the fruits of Eighteenth Century thought.

The Harvest of Peaceful Middle Age 307

There has been no radical change in intellectual
viewpoint since the firm establishment of the scien-
tific method. But there are signs that another revolu-
tion is due.

THE END

ffiwrite Authors and Their Books

THERE are thousands of Americans of all ages who place
that prince of adventurers, Richard Halliburton, at the top
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In another field of literature Stefan Zweig is internation-
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but are proud to publish both Mr. Zweig's MARIE AN-
TOINETTE and his MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTLAND AND THE
ISLES in the Star Library. These are books which lend dis-
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reading. In addition to Stefan Zweig's books, the Star Li-
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have instructed their bookseller to inform them when a
fresh title joins this list. By doing so they save themselves
time and trouble and if they decide to make a purchase they
add a volume to their own library which will be read by the
whole family.